^^^  DIEGO 


3   1822  01227  3959 


-7      'J 


ITALIAN  FANTASIES 


THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 

NEW  YORK   •    BOSTON   •    CHICAGO 
ATLANTA   •    SAN   FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN  &   CO.,  Limited 

LONDON   •    BOMBAY   •    CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE  MACMILLAN  CO.  OF  CANADA,  Ltd. 

TORONTO 


AN    ITALIAN   FANTASY 
By  Stefano  de  Zevio  (Vercna) 


ITALIAN  FANTASIES 


BY 
ISRAEL   ZANGWILL 

AUTHOR  OF  "CHILDREN  OF  THE  GHETTO,' 
"  THE  GREY  WIG,"  ETC.,  ETC. 


THE   MACMILLAN   COMPANY 

1910 

All  rights  reserved 


Copyright,  1910, 
By  the   MACMILLAN   COMPANY. 


Set  up  and  electrotyped.      Published  November,  1910. 


NortoooH  IPtfBB 

J.  8.  Gushing  Co.  —  Berwick  &  Smith  Co. 

Norwood,  Mass.,  U.S.A. 


AUTHOR'S  NOTE 

The  germ   of  this  book  may  be  found  in  three  essays 

under  the  same  title  published  in  "  Harper's  Magazine " 

in  1903  and  1904,  which  had  the  inestimable  advantage 

of  being  illustrated  by  the  late  Louis  Loeb,  "  the  joyous 

comrade "  to  whose  dear  memory  this  imperfect  half  of 

what  was  planned  as  a  joint  labour  of  love  must  now  be 

dedicated. 

I.  Z. 


All  roads  lead  from  Rome 


vi 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 


Of  Beauty,  Faith,  and  Death  :  a  Rhapsody  by  Way  of 

Prelude         1 

Fantasia  Napolitana  :   being  a  Reverie  of  Aquariums, 

Museums,  and  Dead  Christs 18 

The  Carpenter's  Wife  :   a  Capriccio 47 

The  Earth  the  Centre  of  the  Universe  :  or  the  Ab- 
surdity OF  Astronomy 85 

Of  Autocosms  without  Facts:  or  the  Emptiness  of  Re- 
ligions   93 

Of  Facts  without  Autocosms  :   or  the  Irrelevancy  of 

Science 115 

Of  Facts  with  Alien  Autocosms  :   or  the   Futility  of 

Culture 133 

St.  Francis  :   or  the  Irony  of  Institutions        .        .        .  162 
The  Gay  Doges  :   or  the  Failure  of  Society  and  the 

Impossibility  of  Socialism 176 

The  Superman  of  Letters  :  or  the  Hypocrisy  of  Politics  191 

Lucrezia  Borgia  :  or  the  Myth  of  History      .        .        .  206 
Sicily  and  the  Albergo  Samuele  Butler  :  or  the  Fiction 

of  Chronology 216 

Intermezzo 227 

Lachrym^  Rerum  at  Mantua  :   with  a  Denunciation  of 

d'Annunzio 238 

vii 


viii  CONTENTS 


PAOB 


Of  Dead  Sublimities,  Serene  Magxificences,  and  Gagged 

Poets 253 

Variations  on  a  Theme 268 

High  Art  and  Low 276 

An  Excursion  into  the  Grotesque  :  with  a  Glance  at 

Old  Maps  and  Modern  Fallacies 287 

An  Excursion  into  Heaven  and  Hell  :  with  a  Deprecia- 
tion of  Dante 310 

St,  Giulia  and  Female  Suffrage 330 

Icy  Italy  :  with  Venice  Rising  from  the  Sea  .        .        .  340 

The  Dying  Carnival 349 

Napoleon  and  Byron  in  Italy:   or  Letters  and  Action  354 

The  Consolations  of  Phlebotomy  :   a  Paradox  at  Pa  via  366 
Risorgimento  :  with  Some  Remarks  on  San  Marino  and 

THE  Millennium 372 


ITALIAN   FANTASIES 


ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

OF  BEAUTY,  FAITH,  AND  DEATH :  A  RHAP- 
SODY BY  WAY  OF  PRELUDE 

I  TOO  have  crossed  the  Alps,  and  Hannibal  himself  had  no 
such  baggage  of  dreams  and  memories,  such  fife-and-drum 
of  lyrics,  such  horns  of  ivory,  such  emblazoned  standards 
and  streamered  gonfalons,  flying  and  fluttering,  such 
phalanxes  of  heroes,  such  visions  of  cities  to  spoil  and 
riches  to  rifle  —  palace  and  temple,  bust  and  picture, 
tapestry  and  mosaic.  My  elephants  too  matched  his  ;  my 
herds  of  mediaeval  histories,  grotesque  as  his  gargoyled 
beasts.  Nor  without  fire  and  vinegar  have  I  pierced  my 
passage  to  these  green  pastures.  "  Ave  Italia,  regina  terra- 
rum  T^  I  cried,  as  I  kissed  the  hem  of  thy  blue  robe, 
starred  with  white  cities. 

There  are  who  approach  Italy  by  other  portals,  but 
these  be  the  true  gates  of  heaven,  these  purple  peaks 
snow-flashing  as  they  touch  the  stainless  sky  ;  scarred  and 
riven  with  ancient  fires,  and  young  with  jets  of  living 
water.  Nature's  greatness  prepares  the  heart  for  man's 
glory. 

I  too  have  crossed  the  Rubicon,  and  Csesar  gathered  no 
such  booty.  Gold  and  marble  and  sardonyx,  lapis-lazuli, 
agate  and  alabaster,  porphyry,  jasper  and  bronze,  these 
were  the  least  of  my  spoils.  I  plucked  at  the  mystery  of 
the  storied  land  and  fulfilled  my  eyes  of  its  loveliness  and 
colour.  I  have  seen  the  radiant  raggedness  of  Naples  as  I 
squeezed  in  the  squirming,  wriggling  ant-heap  ;  at  Paestum 
I  have  companied  the  lizard  in  the  forsaken  Temple  of 

B  1 


2  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

Poseidon.  (O  the  soaring  Pagan  pillars,  divinely  Doric  !) 
I  have  stood  by  the  Leaning  Tower  in  Bologna  that  gave 
a  simile  to  Dante,  and  by  the  long  low  wall  of  Padua's 
university,  whence  Portia  borrowed  her  learned  plumes ;  I 
have  stayed  to  scan  a  placarded  sonnet  to  a  Doctor  of 
Philology  ;  I  have  walked  along  that  delectable  Riviera  di 
Levante  and  left  a  footprint  on  those  wind-swept  sands 
where  Shelley's  mortal  elements  found  their  fit  resolution 
in  flame.  I  have  lain  under  Boccaccio's  olives,  and  caressed 
with  my  eye  the  curve  of  the  distant  Duomo  and  the  wind- 
ing silver  of  the  Arno.  Florence  has  shown  me  supreme 
earth-beauty,  Venice  supreme  water-beauty,  and  I  have 
worshipped  Capri  and  Amalfi,  offspring  of  the  love- 
marriage  of  earth  and  water. 

O  sacredness  of  sky  and  sun  !  Receive  me,  ye  priests 
of  Apollo.  I  am  for  lustrations  and  white  robes,  that  I 
may  kneel  in  the  dawn  to  the  Sun-God.  Let  me  wind  in 
the  procession  through  the  olive  groves.  For  what  choking 
Christian  cities  have  we  exchanged  the  lucid  Pagan  hill- 
towns  ?  Behold  the  idolatrous  smoke  rising  to  Mammon 
from  the  factory  altars  of  Christendom.  We  have  sacri- 
ficed our  glad  sense  of  the  world-miracle  to  worldly 
miracles  of  loaves  and  fishes.  Grasping  after  the  unseen, 
we  have  lost  the  divinity  of  the  seen.  Ah  me  !  shall  we 
ever  recapture  that  first  lyric  rapture  ? 

O  consecration  of  the  purifying  dawn,  O  flame  on  the 
eastern  altar,  what  cathedral  rose-window  can  replace  thee? 
O  trill  of  the  lark,  soaring  sunward,  O  swaying  of  May 
boughs  and  opening  of  flower  chalices,  what  tinkling  of 
bells  and  swinging  of  censers  can  bring  us  nearer  the 
divine  mystery  ?  What  are  our  liturgies  but  borrowed 
emotions,  grown  cold  in  the  passing  and  staled  by  use  — 
an  anthology  for  apes  ! 

But  I  wrong  the  ape.  Did  not  an  Afric  explorer  —  with 
more  insight  than  most,  albeit  a  woman  —  tell  me  how  even 
an  ape  in  the  great  virgin  forests  will  express  by  solemn 


OF  BEAUTY,   FAITH,   AND  DEATH  3 

capers  some  sense  of  the  glory  and  freshness  of  the  morn- 
ing, his  glimmering  reason  struggling  towards  spiritual 
consciousness,  and  moving  him  to  dance  his  wonder  and 
adoration  ?  Even  so  the  Greek  danced  his  way  to  religion 
and  the  drama.  Alas  for  the  ape's  degenerate  cousin,  the 
townsman  shot  to  business  through  a  tube  ! 

I  grant  him  that  the  shortest  distance  between  two 
points  is  a  straight  line,  yet  'tis  with  the  curve  that  beauty 
commences.  Your  crow  is  the  scientific  flier,  and  a  dis- 
mal bird  it  is.  Who  would  demand  an  austere,  unbend- 
ing route  'twixt  Sorrento  and  Amalfi  instead  of  the  white 
road  that  winds  and  winds  round  that  great  amphitheatre 
of  hills,  doubling  on  itself  as  in  a  mountain  duet,  and  cir- 
cumvoluting  again  and  yet  again,  till  the  intertangled 
melody  of  peaks  becomes  a  great  choral  burst,  and  all  the 
hills  sing  as  in  the  Psalmist,  crag  answering  crag  I  Do 
you  grow  impatient  when  chines  yawn  at  your  feet  and 
to  skirt  them  the  road  turns  inland  half  a  mile,  bringing 
you  back  on  the  other  side  of  the  chasm,  as  to  your  mere 
starting-point  ?  Do  you  crave  for  an  iron-trestled  Ameri- 
can bridge  to  span  the  gap  ?  Nay;  science  is  the  shortest 
distance  between  two  points,  but  beauty,  like  art,  is  long. 

What  is  this  haste  to  arrive?  Give  me  to  walk  and 
walk  those  high  paths  hung  'twixt  mountain  and  sea :  the 
green  wild  grass,  with  its  dots  of  daisy  and  dandelion ; 
cactus  and  asphodel  overhanging  from  the  mountain-side, 
figs,  olives,  vines  sloping  in  terraced  patches  to  the  sea, 
which  through  bronze  leafy  tunnels  shows  blue  and  spar- 
kling at  the  base  of  contorted  cliflPs.  A  woman's  singing 
comes  up  from  the  green  and  grey  tangle  of  gnarled 
trunks,  and  mingles  with  the  sweet  piping  of  the  birds. 
A  brown  man  moves  amid  the  furrows.  A  sybil  issues 
from  a  pass,  leaning  on  her  staff,  driving  a  pair  of  goats, 
her  head  swathed  in  a  great  white  handkerchief.  I  see 
that  the  Italian  painters  have  copied  their  native  land- 
scape as  well  as  their  fellow  men  and  women,  though  they 


4  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

pictured  Palestine  or  Hellas  or  the  land  of  faery.  Not 
from  inner  fancy  did  Dosso  Dossi  create  that  glamorous 
background  for  his  Circe.  That  sunny  enchantment,  that 
redolence  of  mediaeval  romaunt,  exhales  from  many  a 
haunting  spot  in  these  castled  crags.  Not  from  mere 
technical  ingenuity  did  the  artists  of  the  Annunciation 
and  other  sacred  indoor  subjects  introduce  in  their  com- 
position the  spaces  of  the  outc  world  shining  through 
doors  or  windows  or  marble  porticoes,  vistas  of  earthly 
loveliness  fusing  with  the  holy  beauty.  Geology  is  here 
the  handmaiden  of  Art  and  Theology.  The  painters 
found  these  effects  to  hand,  springing  from  the  structure 
of  cities  set  upon  ridges,  as  in  a  humble  smithy  of  Siena 
whose  entrance  is  in  a  street,  but  whose  back,  giving  upon 
a  sheer  precipice,  admits  the  wide  purpureal  landscape ; 
or  in  that  church  in  Perugia,  dominating  the  Umbrian 
valley,  where  the  gloom  of  the  Old  Masters  in  the  dim 
chapel  is  suddenly  broken  by  the  sunlit  spaciousness  of  an 
older  Master,  framed  in  a  little  window.  Do  you  wonder 
that  the  Perugian  Pintoricchio  would  not  let  his  St.  Jerome 
preach  to  a  mere  crowded  interior,  or  that  the  Umbrian 
school  is  from  the  first  alive  to  the  spirit  of  space?  Such 
pictures  Italy  makes  for  us  not  only  from  interiors,  but 
from  wayside  peep-holes,  from  clefts  in  the  rock  or  gaps 
in  the  greenery.  The  country,  dark  with  cypresses  or 
gleaming  with  domes  and  campaniles,  everywhere  com- 
poses itself  into  a  beautiful  harmony ;  one  needs  not  eye- 
points  of  vantage.  The  peep-hole  simply  fixes  one's  point 
of  view,  frames  the  scene  in  one's  horizon  of  vision,  and 
suggests  by  its  enhancement  of  Nature  the  true  task  of 
Art  in  unifying  a  sprawling  chaos  of  phenomena.  And 
if  to  disengage  the  charm  of  space,  Raphael  and  Perugino 
and  Francia  and  even  Mariotto  Albertinelli  make  such 
noble  use  of  the  arch,  was  it  not  that  its  lovely  limitation 
and  definition  of  the  landscape  had  from  early  Roman 
antiquity  been   revealed   by  Architecture?     Arches   and 


OF  BEAUTY,   FAITH,  AND  DEATH  5 

perspectives  of  arches,  cloisters,  and  colonnades,  were 
weaving  a  rhythm  of  space  round  the  artists  in  their  daily- 
walks.  Where  Nature  was  beautiful  and  Art  was  second 
Nature,  the  poets  in  paint  were  made  as  well  as  born. 

Paradox-mongers  have  exalted  Art  above  Nature,  yet 
what  pen  or  brush  could  reproduce  Amalfi — that  vibrant 
atmosphere,  that  shimmer  and  jBicker  of  clouds,  sunshine, 
and  water ;  the  ruined  tower  on  the  spit,  the  low  white 
town,  the  crescent  hills  beyond,  the  blue  sky  bending  over 
all  as  over  a  great  glimmering  cup?  Beethoven,  who 
wrote  always  with  visual  images  in  his  mind,  might  have 
rendered  it  in  another  art,  transposing  it  into  the  key  of 
music  ;  for  is  not  beauty  as  mutable  as  energy,  and  what 
were  the  music  of  the  spheres  but  the  translation  of  their 
shining  infinitude  ? 

Truer  indeed  such  translation  into  singing  sound  than 
into  the  cacophonies  of  speech,  particularly  of  scientific 
speech. 

I  saw  a  great  angel's  wing  floating  over  Rimini,  its 
swan-like  feathers  spread  with  airy  grace  across  the  blue 
—  but  I  must  call  it  cirrus  clouds,  forsooth,  ruffling 
themselves  on  a  firmament  of  illusion.  We  name  a  thing 
and  lo  I  its  wonder  flies,  as  in  those  profound  myths 
where  all  goes  well  till  scientific  curiosity  comes  to  mar 
happiness.  Psyche  turns  the  light  on  Cupid,  Elsa  must 
know  Lohengrin's  name.  With  what  subtle  instinct  the 
Hebrew  refused  to  pronounce  the  name  of  his  deity  I  A 
name  persuades  that  the  unseizable  is  seized,  that  levia- 
than is  drawn  out  with  a  hook.  "  Who  is  this  that 
darkeneth  counsel  by  words  without  knowledge  ?  "  Primi- 
tive man  projected  his  soul  into  trees  and  stones  —  animism 
the  wise  it  call  —  but  we  would  project  into  man  the 
soullessness  of  stones  and  trees.  Finding  no  soul  in 
Nature,  we  would  rob  even  man  of  his,  desperately  dis- 
integrating it  back  to  mechanic  atoms.  The  savage  lifted 
Nature   up   to  himself  ;  we   would  degrade  ourselves  to 


6  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

Nature.  For  scientific  examination  read  unscientific  ex- 
animation.  And  now  'tis  the  rare  poet  and  artist  for 
whom  river  and  tree  incarnate  themselves  in  nymphs  and 
dryads.  Your  Bocklin  painfully  designs  the  figures  once 
created  by  the  painless  mythopoiesis  of  the  race  ;  your 
Kipling  strives  to  breathe  back  life  into  ships  and  engines. 
As  philosophy  is  but  common  sense  by  a  more  circuitous 
route,  so  may  Art  be  self-conscious  savagery.  And  herein 
lies  perhaps  the  true  inwardness  of  the  Psyche  legend. 
The  soul  exchanges  the  joys  of  naivete  for  the  travails  of 
self-consciousness,  but  in  the  end  wins  back  its  simple 
happiness,  more  stably  founded.  Yet,  so  read,  the  myth 
needs  the  supplement  of  an  even  earlier  phase  —  it  might 
well  have  occupied  a  spandrel  at  least  in  those  delicious 
decorations  for  the  ceiling  of  the  Villa  Farnesina  that 
Raphael  drew  from  the  fable  of  Apuleius  —  in  which 
Psyche,  innocent  of  the  corporeal  Cupid,  should  dream  of 
Amor.  For  me  at  least  the  ecstasy  of  vision  has  never 
equalled  the  enchantment  of  the  visionary.  O  palm  and 
citron,  piously  waved  and  rustled  by  my  father  at  the 
Feast  of  Tabernacles,  you  brought  to  my  grey  garret  the 
whisper  and  aroma  of  the  sun-land.  (Prate  not  of  your 
Europes  and  Asias ;  these  be  no  true  geographic  cuts ; 
there  is  but  a  sun-life  and  an  ice-life,  and  the  grey  life  of 
the  neutral  zones.)  But  the  solidities  cannot  vie  with  the 
airy  fantasies.  Where  is  the  magic  morning-freshness 
that  lay  upon  the  dream-city  ?  Dawn  cannot  bring  it, 
though  it  lay  its  consecrating  gold  upon  the  still  lagoons 
of  a  sea-city,  or  upon  the  flower-stones  of  a  Doge's  palace. 
Poets  who  have  sung  best  of  soils  and  women  have  not 
always  known  them  :  the  pine  has  dreamed  of  the  palm, 
and  the  palm  of  the  pine. 

"Heard  melodies  are  sweet,  but  those  unheard  .  .  ." 
Ah,  those  unheard !  Were  it  not  better  done  —  as  poets 
use  —  never  to  sport  with  Beatrice  in  the  shade,  nor  with 
the  tangles  of  loved  Laura's  hair  ?     Shall  Don  Quixote 


OF  BEAUTY,   FAITH,  AND  DEATH  7 

learn  that  Dulcinea  del  Toboso  is  but  a  good,  likely  country 
lass  ?  I  would  not  marry  the  sea  with  a  ring,  no,  not  for 
all  the  gold  and  purple  of  the  Bucentaur.  What  should 
a  Doge  of  dreams  be  doing  in  that  galley  ?  To  wed  the 
sea  —  and  know  its  mystery  but  petulance,  its  unfathomed 
caves  only  the  haunt  of  crude  polypi ;  no  mermaids,  no 
wild  witchery,  and  pearls  but  a  disease  of  the  oyster! 

Maj^hap  I  had  been  wiser  to  keep  my  Italian  castles  in 
Spain  than  to  render  myself  obnoxious  to  the  penalties  of 
the  actual.  Rapacity,  beggary,  superstition,  hover  over 
the  loveliness  of  the  land  like  the  harpies  and  evil  embodi- 
ments in  Ambrogio  Lorenzetti's  homely  Allegory  of  Bad 
Government  in  the  Sala  della  Pace  of  Siena.  To-day  that 
fourteenth-century  cartoonist  would  have  found  many  a 
new  episode  for  his  frescoed  morality-play,  whereof  the 
ground-plot  would  run :  how,  to  be  a  Great  Power  with 
martial  pride  of  place,  Italy  sacrifices  the  substance.  In- 
calculably rich  in  art,  her  every  village  church  bursting 
with  masterpieces  beyond  the  means  of  millionaires,  she 
hugs  her  treasures  to  her  ragged  bosom  with  one  skinny 
hand,  the  other  extended  for  alms.  Adorable  Brother 
Francis  of  Assisi,  with  thy  preachment  of  "  holy  poverty," 
didst  thou  never  suspect  there  could  be  an  unholy  poverty  ? 
'Tis  parlous,  this  beatitude  of  beggary.  More  bandits 
bask  at  thy  shrine  than  at  almost  any  other  spot  in  Chris- 
tendom. Where  the  pilgrims  are,  there  the  paupers  are 
gathered  together ;  there  must  be  rich  prey  in  those 
frenzied  devotees  who  crawl  up  thy  chapel,  licking  its 
rough  stones  smooth.  Thou  hadst  no  need  of  food :  if 
two  small  loaves  were  provided  for  thy  forty  days'  Lent 
in  that  island  in  the  Lake  of  Perugia,  one  and  a  half  re- 
mained uneaten ;  and  even  if  half  a  loaf  seemed  better  to 
thee  than  no  bread,  'twas  merely  because  the  few  mouth- 
fuls  chased  far  from  thee  the  venom  of  a  vainglorious  copy 
of  thy  Master.  Perchance  'tis  from  some  such  humility 
the  beggars  of  Assisi  abstain  from  a  too  emulous  copy  of 


8  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

thee.  Thou  didst  convert  thy  brother,  the  fierce  wolf  of 
Agobio,  and  give  the  countryside  peace,  but  what  of  this 
pack  of  wolves  thou  hast  loosed  —  in  sheep's  clothing! 
With  wliat  joy  did  I  see  in  a  church  at  Verona  an  old 
barefoot,  naked-kneed  beggar,  who  v/as  crouching  against 
a  pillar,  turn  into  marble ! 

Or  shall  we  figure  Italia's  beggars  as  her  mosquitoes,  in- 
evitable accompaniment  of  her  beauties  ?  The  mosquito- 
mendicant,  come  he  as  cripple  or  cicerone,  buzzes  ever  in 
one's  ears,  foe  to  meditation  and  enkindlement.  Figure 
me  seeking  refuge  in  a  Palazzo  of  once  imperial  Genoa  ; 
treading  pensively  the  chambers  of  Youth  and  Life,  the 
Arts,  and  the  Four  Seasons,  through  which  duchesses  and 
marchese  had  trailed  silken  skirts.  With  gaze  uplifted  at 
the  painted  ceilings,  I  ponder  on  that  magnificence  of  the 
world  and  the  flesh  which  the  Church  could  not  wither  — 
nay,  which  found  consummate  expression  in  the  Pope's 
own  church  in  St.  Peter's,  where  the  baldachino  of  twin- 
kling lights  supplies  the  one  touch  of  religious  poetry.  I 
pass  into  the  quiet  library  and  am  received  by  the  vener- 
able custodian,  a  Dr.  Faustus  in  black  skull-cap  and  white 
beard.  He  does  the  honours  of  his  learned  office,  brings 
me  precious  Aldines.  Behold  this  tome  of  antique  poetry, 
silver-typed  —  a  "limited  edition,"  twenty -four  copies 
made  for  the  great  families.  He  gloats  with  me  over 
Ovid's  "  Metamorphoses  "  ;  over  the  fantasy  of  the  title- 
page,  the  vignettes  of  nymphs  and  flowers,  the  spacious 
folio  pages.  Here  is  Homer  in  eight  languages.  My 
heart  goes  out  to  the  scholarly  figure  as  w^e  bend  over  the 
parallel  columns,  bookworms  both.  I  envy  the  gentle 
Friar  of  Letters  his  seclusion  and  his  treasures.  He  lugs 
out  a  mediaeval  French  manuscript,  a  poem  on  summer  — 
Saison  aussi  utile  que  belle,  he  adds  unexpectedly.  We 
discourse  on  manuscripts:  of  tlie  third-century  Virgil 
at  Florence  and  its  one  missing  leaf  in  the  Vatican ;  how 
French  manuscripts  may  be  found  as  early  as  the  tenth 


OF  BEAUTY,   FAITH,   AND,  DEATH  9 

century,  while  the  Italian  scarcely  precede  Dante,  and 
demonstrate  his  creation  of  the  language.  We  laud  the 
Benedictines  for  their  loving  labour  in  multiplying  texts  — 
he  is  wrought  up  to  produce  the  apple  of  his  eye,  an  illu- 
minated manuscript  that  had  belonged  to  a  princess.  It 
is  bound  in  parchment,  with  golden  clasps.  Figures  de 
la  Bible  I  seem  to  remember  on  its  ornate  title-page.  I 
bend  lovingly  over  the  quaint  letters,  I  see  the  princess's 
wliite  hand  turning  the  polychrome  pages,  her  lace  sleeve 
ruffled  exquisitely  as  in  a  Bronzino  portrait.  Suddenly 
Dr.  Faustus  ejaculates  in  English  :  "  Give  me  a  drink  !  " 

My  princess  fled  almost  with  a  shriek,  and  I  came  back 
to  the  sordid  Italy  of  to-day.  Of  to-day?  Is  not  yester- 
day's glamour  equally  illusionary?  But  perhaps  Genoa 
with  her  commercial  genius  is  no  typical  daughter  of 
Italia.  Did  not  Dante  and  the  Tuscan  proverb  alike  de- 
nounce her  ?  Does  not  to-day's  proverb  say  that  it  takes 
ten  Jews  to  make  one  Genoese  ?  And  yet  it  was  Genoa 
that  produced  Mazzini  and  sped  Garibaldi. 

Would  you  wipe  out  this  bookish  memory  by  a  better  ? 
Then  picture  the  library  of  a  monastery,  that  looks  out  on 
the  cypressed  hills,  whose  cloisters  Sodoma  and  Signorelli 
frescoed  with  naive  legends  of  St.  Benedict  and  Satan. 
See  under  the  long  low  ceiling,  propped  on  the  cool  white 
pillars,  those  niched  rows  of  vellum  bindings  guarding  the 
leisurely  Latin  lore  of  the  Fathers.  Behold  me  meditating 
the  missals  and  pontificals,  pageants  in  manuscript,  broid- 
ered  and  illuminated,  all  glorious  with  gold  initials  and 
ultramarine  and  vermilion  miniatures,  or  those  folio  pro- 
cessions of  sacred  music,  each  note  pranked  in  its  bravery 
and  stepping  statelily  amid  garlands  of  blue  and  gold  and 
the  hovering  faces  of  angels ;  dreaming  myself  into  that 
mystic  peace  of  the  Church,  till  the  vesper  bell  calls  to 
paternosters  and  genuflexions  and  the  great  organ  rolls 
out  to  drown  this  restless,  anchorless  century.  Now  am 
I   for   nones    and   primes,    for    vigils  and  sackcloth,    for 


10  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

breviaries  and  holy  obedience.  In  shady  cloisters,  'mid 
faded  frescoes,  round  sleepy  rose-gardens,  I  will  pace  to 
papal  measures,  while  the  serene  sun-dial  registers  the 
movement  of  the  sun  round  the  earth.  Who  speaks  of  a 
religion  as  though  it  were  dependent  upon  its  theology  ? 
Dogmas  are  but  its  outward  show  ;  inwardly  and  subtly  it 
lives  by  its  beauty,  its  atmosphere,  its  inracination  in  life, 
and  its  creed  is  but  a  poor  attempt  to  put  into  words  a 
thought  too  large  for  syllables,  too  illusive  for  phrases. 
Language  is  a  net  that  catches  the  fish  and  lets  the  ocean 
stream  through.     Again  that  fallacy  of  the  Name. 

Beautiful  I  will  call  that  service  I  saw  at  Bologna  on 
Whitsun  Sunday,  though  you  must  dive  deep  to  find  the 
beauty.  Not  in  S.  Petronio  itself  will  you  find  it,  in  those 
bulbous  pillars  swathed  in  crimson  damask,  though  there 
is  a  touch  of  it  in  the  vastness,  the  far  altar,  the  remote 
choir  and  surpliced  priests  on  high,  the  great  wax  candle 
under  the  big  baldachino,  the  congregation  lost  in  space. 
Nor  will  you  easily  recognise  it  in  the  universal  disorder, 
in  that  sense  of  a  church  parade  ivithin  the  church,  in  the 
brouhaha  that  drowns  the  precentor's  voice,  in  the  penny 
chairs  planted  or  stacked  as  the  worshippers  ebb  or  flow, 
in  the  working  men  and  their  families  sprawling  over  the 
altar-steps,  in  the  old  women  coifed  in  coloured  handker- 
chiefs, with  baskets  that  hold  bottles  as  well  as  prayer- 
books  ;  not  even  in  the  pretty  women  in  Parisian  hats,  or 
the  olive-skinned  girls  in  snoods,  least  of  all  in  the  child's 
red  balloon,  soaring  to  the  roof  at  the  very  moment  of  the 
elevation  of  the  Host,  and  followed  with  heavenward  eyes 
by  half  the  congregation.  And  yet  there  is  no  blasphemy 
even  in  the  balloon  ;  the  child's  innocent  pleasure  in  its 
toy  is  mixed  with  its  sense  of  holy  festivity.  There  is  no 
sharp  contrast  of  sacred  and  secular.  The  church  does 
not  end  with  its  portals  ;  it  extends  into  the  great  piazza. 
Nor  do  the  crowds  squatting  on  its  steps  in  the  sun,  and 
seething  in  the  square  it  dominates,  feel  themselves  out' 


OF  BEAUTY,   FAITH,  AND  DEATH  11 

side  the  service.  The  very  pigeons  seem  to  flutter  with 
a  sense  of  sacred  holiday,  as  though  they  had  just  listened 
to  the  sermon  of  their  big  brother,  St.  Francis.  The 
Church,  like  the  radiant  blue  sky,  is  over  all.  And  this 
is  the  genius  of  Catholicism. 

Not  without  significance  are  those  thirteenth-century 
legends  in  which  even  the  birds  and  the  fishes  were  brought 
into  the  fold  universal,  as  into  a  spiritual  Noah's  Ark,  all 
equally  in  need  of  salvation.  Some  of  the  Apostles  them- 
selves were  mere  fishers,  spreading  no  metaphoric  net. 
What  an  evolution  to  St.  Antony,  who  wins  the  finny 
tribes  to  reverence  and  dismisses  them  with  the  divine 
blessing  !  Even  the  horses  are  blessed  in  Rome  on  St. 
Antony's  Day,  or  in  his  name  at  Siena  before  the  great 
race  for  the  Palio,  each  runner  sprinkled  in  the  church  of 
its  ward. 

To  think  that  missionaries  go  forth  to  preach  verbal 
propositions  violently  torn  from  the  life  and  the  historic 
enchainment  and  the  art  and  the  atmosphere  !  If  they 
would  but  stay  at  home  and  reform  the  words,  which 
must  ever  change,  so  as  to  preserve  the  beauty,  which  must 
never  die  !  For  words  must  change,  if  only  to  counter- 
balance their  own  mutations  and  colourings,  their  declines 
and  falls.  They  are  no  secure  envelope  for  immortal 
truths:  I  would  as  lief  embody  my  fortunes  in  a  paper 
currency.  Let  the  religion  of  the  future  be  writ  only  in 
music  —  Palestrina's  or  Allegri's,  Bach's  or  Wagner's,  as 
you  will  —  so  that  no  heresies  can  spring  from  verbal 
juggles,  distorted  texts,  or  legal  quibbles.  And  yet  — 
would  the  harmony  be  unbroken  ?  What  quarrels  over 
misprinted  sharps  and  naturals  !  How  the  doctors  of 
music  would  disagree  on  the  tempo  and  the  phrasing  and 
burn  and  excommunicate  for  a  dotted  semibreve  !  What 
Church  Councils — the  pianissimo  party  versus  the  fortis- 
simo, legato  legions  and  staccato  squadrons,  the  Holy 
Wars  of  Harmony  —  all  Christian  history  da  capo  ! 


12  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

I  like  that  gracious  tolerance  of  buiiiauisiii  you  find  in 
some  Renaissance  pictures,  those  composite  portraits  of 
ideas,  in  wliich  Pagan  and  Christian  types  and  periods 
mingle  in  the  higher  syntliesis  of  conception  —  or  perhaps 
even  in  a  happy  inconsistence  of  dual  belief.  Rapliael 
could  not  represent  the  conflagration  in  the  Borgo  that 
was  extinguished  by  papal  miracle  without  consecrating  a 
corner  of  his  work  to  the  piety  of  J:Cneas,  carrying  Anchises 
on  his  back  in  a  parallel  moment  of  peril.  Raphael's 
work  is,  in  fact,  almost  a  series  of  illustrations  of  the 
Sposalizio  of  Hebraism  and  Hellenism.  That  librarj^  of 
Julius  11.  in  the  Vatican  may  stand  as  the  scene  of  their 
union.  Beyond  the  true  Catholicism  of  its  immortal  fres- 
coes humanism  cannot  go.  If  the  Theology  is  mainly  con- 
fined to  Biblical  concepts  and  figures,  it  is  supplemented 
by  Perino  del  Vaga's  picture  of  the  Cumsean  Sybil  showing 
the  Madonna  to  Augustus,  which  is  at  least  a  dovetailing  of 
the  divided  worlds  and  eras.  And  if  to  explain  the  parity 
of  Sybils  with  prophets  in  the  designs  of  Michelangelo  you 
call  in  those  Fathers  of  the  Church  who  found  Christology 
in  the  old  Sybilline  leaves  and  have  coupled  David  and 
the  Sybil  in  the  Catholic  funeral  service,  you  must  admit 
a  less  dubious  largeness  in  Raphael's  cartoons  for  the 
dome  mosaics  in  the  Cappella  Chigi  of  Santa  Maria  del 
Popolo;  for  to  group  tlie  gods  of  Hellas  round  the  Creator 
and  His  angels,  even  by  an  astronomic  device  involving  their 
names  for  the  planets,  shows  a  mood  very  far  removed 
from  that  of  the  Christians  who  went  to  the  lions  in  this 
very  Rome.  (The  consistent  Christian  mood  is  seen  in 
the  (Quaker's  avoidance  of  the  heathen  names  of  our  days 
and  months,  mere  bald  numeration  replacing  the  Norse 
and  Roman  divinities.)  Moreover,  Raphael's  Parnassus 
is  almost  wholly  to  the  glorj^  of  ancient  Greece  and  Rome. 
It  is  Dante  and  Petrarch  who  are  honoured  by  neighbour- 
ing Homer  and  Virgil.  It  is  the  violin  that  is  glorified 
by  Apollo's  playing  upon  it.     Anaclironism  if  you  will. 


OF  BEAUTY,   FAITH,   AND   DEATH  13 

But  Art  may  choose  to  see  history  sub  specie  ceternitatis, 
and  surely  in  Plato's  heaven  rests  the  archetypal  violin,  to 
which  your  Stradivarius  or  Guarnerius  is  a  banjo. 

Nor  has  antiquity  ever  received  a  nobler  tribute  than  in 
TJie  School  of  Athens,  that  congregation  of  Pagan  philo- 
sophers to  which  the  Dukes  of  Urbino  and  Mantua  repair, 
to  which  Raphael  himself  brings  his  teacher,  while  Bra- 
mante,  builder  of  St.  Peter's,  is  proud  to  adorn  the  train  of 
Aristotle.  See,  too,  under  the  ceiling-painting  of  Justice, 
how  Moses  bringing  the  tables  of  the  Law  to  the  Israelites 
is  supplemented  by  Justinian  giving  the  Pandects  to 
Tritonian.  Thus  is  Justice  more  subtly  illustrated  than 
perhaps  the  painter  consciously  designed.  How  finely  — 
if  even  more  paradoxically  —  this  temper  repeats  itself 
later  in  the  English  Puritan  and  Italian  sonneteer,  Milton, 
whose  "  Lycidas "  vibrates  'twixt  the  Classic  and  the 
Christian,  and  whose  very  epic  of  Plebraism  is  saturated 
with  catholic  allusiveness,  and  embraces  that  stately  pane- 
gyric of 

Athens,  the  eye  of  Greece,  mother  of  arts 

And  eloquence. 

Why,  indeed,  quarrel  over  religions  when  all  men  agree  ; 
all  men,  that  is,  at  the  same  grade  of  intellect  !  The 
learned  busy  themselves  classifying  religions  —  there  are 
reviews  at  Paris  and  Tubingen  —  but  in  the  crude  work- 
ing world  religion  depends  less  on  the  belief  than  on  the 
believer.  All  the  simplest  minds  believe  alike,  be  they 
Confucians  or  Christians,  Jews  or  Fantees.  The  elemental 
human  heart  will  have  its  thaumaturgic  saints,  its  mapped 
hells,  its  processional  priests,  its  prompt  answers  to  prayer, 
and  if  deprived  of  them  will  be  found  subtly  to  reintro- 
duce them.  Mohammed  and  the  Koran  forbade  the  wor- 
ship of  saints,  yet  the  miracles  and  mediations  of  the  waits 
and  the  pilgrimages  to  their  tombs  —  with  Mohammed 
himself  as  arch-wali  —  are  inseparable  from  Islam.  The 
Buddha  who  came  to  teach  a  holy  atheism  was  made  a 


14  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

god,  the  proclaiiner  of  natural  law  a  miracle-monger,  his 
revolution  turned  into  a  revolution  of  prayer-Avheels  and 
his  religion  into  the  High  Church  Romanism  of  Lamaism. 
Tlie  Hebrew  Torah  which  cried  anathema  on  idols  be- 
came itself  an  idol,  swathed  in  purple,  adorned  with 
golden  bells,  and  borne  round  like  a  Madonna  for  reverent 
kisses.  The  Madonna  herself,  overgrown  with  the  roses 
of  a  wayside  shrine,  perpetuates  the  worship  of  Flora. 
On  the  very  gates  of  St.  Peter's,  Europa,  Ganymede,  and 
Leda  show  their  brazen  faces.  Not  Confucius  nor  Christ 
can  really  expel  devils.  What  grosser  idolatry  than  the 
worship  of  those  dressed  wax  dolls  which  make  many  an 
Italian  church  like  a  theological  Madame  Tussaud's  I 
The  Church  has  its  Chamber  of  Horrors  too,  its  blood  and 
nails  and  saintly  skulls ;  the  worship  of  Moloch  was  not 
more  essentially  morbid.  At  tlie  base  of  the  intellectual 
mountain  flourishes  rank  and  gorgeous  vegetation,  a 
tropic  luxuriance ;  higher  up,  in  the  zone  of  mediocrity, 
there  are  cultivated  temperate  slopes  and  pruned  gardens, 
pleasant  pastures  and  ordered  bowers  ;  at  the  snowy  sum- 
mits, in  the  rarefied  jcther,  flash  white  the  glacial  imper- 
sonal truths,  barely  a  tuft  of  moss  or  lichen.  H.ark  !  peak 
is  crying  unto  peak  :  "  Thy  will  be  done." 

But  what  is  this  new  voice  —  comes  it  from  the  mole- 
hills?—  "  Our  will  be  done."  See  —  in  tlie  mask  of  the 
highest  Christianity  and  science  —  the  old  thaumaturgy 
creeping  in,  though  now  every  man  is  his  own  saint,  heal- 
ing his  own  diseases,  denying  death  with  a  Podsnappian 
wave  o'  the  hand.  O  my  friends,  get  ye  to  the  Eternal 
City  —  that  canvas  for  the  flying  panorama  of  races  and 
creeds  —  and  peep  into  a  cofiin  in  the  Capitoline  Museum, 
and  see  the  skeleton  of  the  Etruscan  girl,  with  rings  glit- 
tering on  her  l)ony  hngers,  and  bracelets  on  her  fleshless 
wrists,  and  her  doll  at  her  side,  in  ironic  preservation,  its 
blooming  cheeks  and  sparkling  eyes  mocking  the  eyeless 
occiput    of    its   mistress.       Even   so    shall   your    hugged 


OF  BEAUTY,   FAITH,   AND   DEATH  15 

treatises  and  your  glittering  gospels  show  among  your 
bones.  Do  you  not  know  that  death  is  the  very  condition 
of  life  —  bound  up  with  it  as  darkness  with  light  ?  How 
trivial  the  thought  that  sees  death  but  in  the  cemetery  ! 
'Tis  not  only  the  grave  that  parts  us  from  our  comrades 
and  lovers ;  we  lose  them  on  the  way.  Lose  them  not 
only  by  quarrel  and  estrangement,  bat  by  evolution  and 
retrogression.  They  broaden  or  narrow  away  from  us, 
and  we  from  them ;  they  are  changed,  other,  transformed, 
dead  and  risen  again.  Woe  for  the  orphans  of  living 
parents,  the  widowers  of  undeceased  wives  !  Our  early 
Ego  dies  by  inches,  till,  like  the  perpetually  darned  sock, 
it  retains  nothing  but  the  original  mould  and  shaping. 
Let  us  read  the  verse  more  profoundly  :  "  In  the  midst  of 
life  we  are  in  death."  Whoever  dies  in  the  full  tilt  of 
his  ambitions  is  buried  alive,  and  whoever  survives  his 
hopes  and  fears  is  dead,  unburied.  Death  for  us  is  all  we 
have  missed,  all  the  periods  and  planets  we  have  not  lived 
in,  all  the  countries  we  have  not  visited,  all  the  books  we 
have  not  read,  all  the  emotions  and  experiences  we  have 
not  had,  all  the  prayers  we  have  not  prayed,  all  the  battles 
we  have  not  fought.  Every  restriction,  every  negation, 
is  a  piece  of  death.  Not  wholly  has  jjopular  idiom 
ignored  this  truth.  "  Dead  to  higher  things,"  it  says ; 
but  we  may  be  dead  too  to  the  higher  mathematics. 
Death  for  the  individual  is  the  whole  universe  outside 
his  consciousness,  and  life  but  the  tiny  blinking  light  of 
consciousness.  But  between  the  light  and  the  dark  is 
perpetual  interplay,  and  Ave  turn  dark  to  light  and  let 
light  subside  to  dark  as  our  thoughts  and  feelings  veer 
this  way  or  that. 

And  since  'tis  complexity  of  consciousness  that  counts, 
and  the  death  of  the  amoeba  or  the  unborn  babe  is  less  a 
decomposition  than  the  death  of  a  man,  so  is  the  death  of 
a  philosopher  vaster  than  the  death  of  a  peasant.  We 
have  but  one  word  for  the  drying  up  of  an  ocean  and  the 


16  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

drying  up  of  a  pool.  And  the  sediment,  the  day  that  we 
bury,  wherefore  do  we  still  label  it  with  the  living  name? 
As  if  Ceesar  might  truly  stop  a  bung -hole  !  Mark  Antony 
might  come  to  praise  Ciesar ;  he  could  not  bury  him. 

Here  lies  .Alazzini  forsooth !  As  if  that  spirit  of  white 
fire  could  rest  even  on  the  farthest  verge  of  thee,  O  abom- 
inable Campo  Santo  of  Genoa,  with  thy  central  rotunda 
pillared  with  black  marble,  thy  spires  and  Grecian  build- 
ings, thy  Oriental  magnificence,  redeemed  only  by  the 
natural  hills  in  which  thou  nestlest.  Are  our  ashes  in- 
deed so  grandiose  and  spectacular  a  thing  ?  Or  art  thou 
a  new  terror  added  to  death  ?  From  thy  haughty  terrace 
—  whereon  Death  himself  in  black  marble  fights  with  a 
desperate  woman  —  I  have  gazed  down  upon  thy  four  par- 
allelograms, bounded  by  cypresses  and  starred  with  great 
daisies,  that  seen  nearer  are  white  crosses,  and  a  .simple 
contadina  lighting  the  lamp  for  her  beloved  dead  alone 
softens  the  scene.  O  the  endless  statuary  of  the  gallery, 
the  arcades  of  slabs  and  reliefs,  the  faded  wreaths,  or  those 
drearier  beads  that  never  fade !  —  I  could  pray  to  the 
Madonna  whose  blue  and  gold  halo  shines  over  thy  dead 
to  send  a  baby  earthquake  to  swallow  thee  up. 

Away  with  these  cemeteries  of  stone,  this  frigid  pomp  of 
death,  that  clings  on  to  life  even  while  spouting  texts  of 
resignation!  Who  cares  for  these  parish  chronicles,  these 
parallelograms  of  good  people  that  lived  and  fell  on  sleep, 
these  worthy  citizens  and  fond  spouses.  Horrid  is  that 
clasp  of  intertwined  hands.  I  could  chop  at  those  fingers 
with  an  axe.  'Tis  indecent,  tliis  graveyard  flirtation. 
Respect  your  privacy,  good  skeletons!  Ye  too,  couples 
of  the  Etruscan  catacombs,  who  dash  our  spirits  from  your 
urns,  to  wliut  end  your  graven  images  outside  your  in- 
cinerated relics  ?  Not  in  marmoreal  mausolea,  nor  in 
railed-off  tombs,  with  knights  and  dames  couchant,  not  in 
Medici  chapels  nor  in  the  florid  monuments  of  Venetian 
Doges,  not  in  the  columbaria  of  the  Via  Appia  nor  in  the 


OF  BEAUTY,   FAITH,   AND   DEATH  17 

Gothic  street-tombs  of  the  Scaliger  princes,  resides  death's 
true  dignit}'^ — they  are  the  vain  apery  of  life  —  but  in 
some  stoneless,  flowerless  grave  where  only  the  humped 
earth  tells  that  here  lies  the  husk  of  one  gathered  into 
the  vastness  of  oblivion. 

There  are  times  when  one  grows  impatient  for  death. 
There  is  a  sweetness  in  being  gathered  to  one's  fathers. 
The  very  phrase  is  restful.  Dying  sounds  more  active  ; 
it  recalls  doing,  and  one  is  so  tired  of  doing.  But  to  be 
culled  softly,  to  be  sucked  up  —  the  very  vapour  of  the 
Apostle — how  balmily  passive  :  to  be  wafted  into  the 
quiet  Past,  which  robs  even  fame  of  its  sting,  and  wherein 
lie  marshalled  and  sorted  and  ticketed  and  dated,  in  stately 
dictionaries  and  monumental  encyclopaedias,  all  those 
noisy  poets,  painters,  -warriors,  all  neatly  classified  and 
silent.  And  the  sweet  silence  of  the  grave  allures  even 
after  the  bitter  silence  of  life  ;  after  the  silent  endurance 
that  is  our  one  reply  to  the  insolence  of  facts.  And  in 
these  delicate,  seductive  moments,  half  longing,  half  ac- 
quiescence, the  air  is  tremulous  with  tender,  crooning 
phrases,  with  gentle,  wistful  melodies,  the  hush-a-bye  of 
the  earth-mother  drawing  us  softly  to  her  breast. 

But  an  you  will  not  acquiesce  in  simple  earth-to-earth,  I 
commend  you  to  the  Greek  sarcophagi  you  may  see  in  the 
Naples  Museum.  There  you  will  find  no  smirking  senti- 
ment, no  skull  and  cross-bones  —  ensign  of  Pirate  Death 
—  but  the  very  joy  of  life,  ay,  even  a  Bacchanalian  glad- 
ness. I  recall  a  radiant  procession,  Cupids  riding  centaurs 
and  lions  and  j^laying  On  lyres,  mortals  driving  chariots 
and  blowing  trumpets,  or  dancing  along,  arms  round  one 
another's  necks. 

"  What  pipes  and  timbrels,  what  wild  ecstasy  I  " 

Bury  me  in  an  old  Greek  sarcophagus,  or  let  me  fade  into 
the  anonymous  grass. 


FANTASIA   NAPOLITANA  :    BEING  A  REVERIE 

OF   AQUARIUMS,   MUSEUMS,  AND    DEAD 

CHRISTS 

I 

Of  all  the  excursions  I  made  from  Naples  —  renowned 
headquarters  for  excursions  —  none  led  me  through  more 
elemental  highways  than  that  which  started  from  the 
Aquarium,  at  a  fee  of  two  lire.  Doubtless  the  Aquarium 
of  Naples  exists  for  men  of  science,  but  men  of  art  may- 
well  imagine  it  has  been  designed  as  a  noble  poem  in 
colour.  Such  chromatic  splendours,  such  wondrous 
greens  and  browns  and  reds,  subtly  not  the  colour  scale 
of  earth,  for  over  all  a  mystic  translucence,  a  cool  suffu- 
sion, every  hue  suffering  "  a  sea  change  into  something 
rich  and  strange " !  And  the  form  of  all  these  sea- 
creatures  and  sea-flowers  so  graceful,  so  grotesque,  so 
manifold !  "  Nature's  plastic  hand,"  as  Dante  hath  it, 
works  deftly  in  water.  It  leaps  to  the  eye  tliat  Art 
has  invented  scarcely  anything,  that  the  art  of  design  in 
particular  is  a  vast  plagiarism.  Here  be  your  carpets 
and  your  wall-patterns,  your  frosted  glass  and  your 
pottery.  What  Persian  rug  excels  yon  lamprey's  skin? 
]My  mind  goes  back  to  a  great  craftsman's  studio,  stacked 
with  brilliant  beetles  and  dragon-flies  —  Nature's  feats  of 
bravura  —  to  eke  out  his  inventions.  Even  the  dress- 
maker, I  remember,  is  the  greatest  client  of  the  butterfly- 
net  in  her  quest  for  delicious  colour-blendings.  Yet 
with  how  few  root-ideas  Nature  has  worked ;  the  infini- 
tude of  her  combinations  is  purely  an  affair  of  arrange- 
ment,  complicated  with  secondary  qualities  of  size   and 

18 


FANTASIA  NAPOLITANA  19 

colour.  Conscious  life  even  at  its  most  complex  is  a 
function  of  four  variables  :  a  food  apparatus,  a  breathing 
apparatus,  a  circulating  apparatus,  and  a  nerve  apparatus. 
With  what  inimitable  ingenuity  Nature  has  rung  the 
changes  on  these  four  factors  !  Her  problem  has  affinities 
with  the  task  of  the  inventors  of  typewriters,  who,  having 
to  produce  the  same  collision  of  inked  type  with  blank 
paper,  have  found  so  many  ways  of  achieving  it  that  their 
machines  resemble  highly  organised  creatures  of  curious 
conformation,  one  having  no  resemblance  to  another. 
Some  are  annular  and  some  are  cubical,  some  have  wheels 
of  letters,  some  have  letters  that  fly  singly.  'Tis  scarcely 
credible  that  they  all  do  the  same  work.  Are  not  animals 
machines  ?  said  Descartes.  But  I  ask,  Are  not  machines 
animals  ?  A  vision  surges  up  of  Venice  at  night  —  out 
of  the  darkness  of  the  Grand  Canal  comes  throbbing  a 
creature  of  the  Naples  Aquarium  —  all  scattered  blobs  of 
flame,  cohering  through  a  spidery  framework.  Through 
the  still,  dark  water  it  glides,  under  the  still,  starry  sky, 
with  San  Giorgio  for  solemn  background,  and  only  from 
the  voices  of  Venetians  singing  as  they  float  past  —  an 
impassioned,  sad  memory,  a  trilled  and  fluted  song  — 
could  one  divine  behind  the  fiery  sea-dragon  the  mere 
steam-launch.  Between  the  laws  that  fashioned  steam- 
boats and  those  that  fashioned  the  animate  world  there 
is  no  essential  difference.  The  steamboat  is  not  even 
inanimate,  for  at  the  back  of  it  burrows  man  like  a 
nautilus  in  its  shell,  and  his  living  will  has  had  to  fight 
with  the  same  shaping  forces  as  those  which  mould  the 
entities  of  the  water.  The  saurian  age  of  the  steamboat 
was  the  uncouth  hollowed  trunk,  and  by  slow,  patient 
evolutions  and  infinite  tackings  to  meet  winds  and  tides, 
it  has  come  to  this  graceful,  gliding  creature  that  skims 
in  the  teeth  of  the  tempest.  Denied  the  mastery  of 
water,  man  adds  a  floating  form  to  his  own ;  forbidden 
the  sky,  he  projects  from  himself  a  monstrous  aery  sac 


20  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

or  winged  engine;  condemned  to  crawl  the  earth,  he 
supplements  liis  nerves  with  an  electric  motor  apparatus. 
Thus  endlessly  transformed,  Man  the  Prometheus  is  also 
i\Iaii  the  Proteus.  Dante  praised  Nature  for  having 
ceased  to  frame  monsters,  save  the  whale  and  the  ele- 
phant ;  he  did  not  remark  that  Man  had  continued  her 
work  on  a  substratum  of  himself. 

The  forms  of  the  typewriters  are  even  more  clearly 
conditioned  by  the  struggle  for  life.  The  early  patents 
are  the  creatures  in  j)ossession,  and  to  develop  a  new 
type  without  infringing  on  their  pastures,  and  risking 
their  claws,  a  machine  is  driven  into  ever-odder  contri- 
vances, like  creatures  that  can  only  exist  in  an  over- 
crowded milieu  by  wriggling  into  some  curious  shape  and 
filling  some  forgotten  niche.  The  lust  of  life  that  runs 
through  Nature  transforms  the  very  dust  to  a  creeping 
palpitation,  fills  every  leaf  and  drop  of  water  with  pullu- 
lating populations.  'Tis  an  eternal  exuberance,  a  riotous 
extravagance,  an  ecstasy  of  creation.  Great  is  Diana 
of  the  Ephesians,  for  this  Diana,  as  you  may  see  her 
figured  in  the  Naples  Museum,  black  but  comely,  is  a 
goddess  of  many  breasts,  a  teeming  mother  of  genera- 
tions, the  swart,  sun-kissed  Natura  Nutrix,  who  ranges 
recklessly  from  man  to  the  guinea-pig,  from  the  earwig 
to  the  giraffe,  from  the  ostrich  to  the  tortoise,  from  the 
butterfly  to  the  lizard,  from  the  glued  barnacle  timidly 
extending  its  tentacles  when  the  tide  washes  food  towards 
its  rock,  to  the  ravenous  shark  darting  fiercely  through 
the  waters  and  seizing  even  man  in  its  iron  jaws.  Yet 
they  are  at  best  mere  variations  on  the  primal  theme  of 
heart,  brain,  lungs,  and  stomach,  now  with  enchanting- 
grace  as  in  the  gazelle,  now  with  barbaric  splendour  as 
in  the  peacock,  now  with  a  touch  of  grotesque  genius 
as  in  the  porcupine.  And  directly  or  indirectly  all  of 
them  pass  into  one  another  —  in  the  most  literal  of  senses 
—  as  they  range  the  mutual  larder  of  the  globe. 


FANTASIA  NAPOLITANA  21 

'Tis  well  to  remember  sometimes  that  this  globe  is  not 
obviously  coDstvucted  for  man,  since  only  one-fourth  of  it 
is  even  land,  and  that  in  a  census  of  the  planet,  which  no- 
body has  ever  thought  of  taking,  man's  poor  thousand 
millions  would  be  outnumbered  by  the  mere  ant-hills. 
And  since  the  preponderating  interests  numerically  of  this 
sphere  of  ours  are  piscine,  and  in  a  truly  democratic  world 
a  Fish  President  Avould  reign,  elected  by  the  vast  majority 
of  voters,  and  we  should  all  be  bowing  down  to  Dagon, 
the  Aquarium  acquires  an  added  dignity,  and  I  gaze  with 
fresh  eyes  at  the  lustrous  emerald  tanks. 

Ah,  here  is  indeed  a  Fish  President,  the  shell-fish  that 
presided  over  the  world's  destinies ;  the  little  murex  that 
was  the  source  of  the  greatness  of  Tyre,  and  the  weaver 
of  its  purpureal  robes  of  empire.  Hence  the  Phoenician 
commerce,  Carthage,  the  Punic  Wars,  and  the  alphabet  in 
which  I  write. 

Not  only  is  colour  softened  by  a  sea  change,  but  in  this 
cool,  glooming,  and  glittering  world  the  earth-creatures 
seem  to  have  been  sucked  down  and  transformed  into 
water-creatures.  There  are  flowers  and  twigs  and  green 
waving  grass  that  seem  earth-flowers  and  twigs  and  grass 
transposed  into  the  key  of  water. 

Only,  these  flowers  and  grasses  are  animal,  these  coralline 
twigs  are  conscious ;  as  if  water,  emulous  of  the  creations 
of  earth  and  air,  strove  after  their  loveliness  of  curve  and 
line,  or  as  if  the  mermaidens  covered  them  for  their 
gardens.  And  there  are  gemmed  fishes,  as  though  the 
mines  of  Ind  had  their  counterpart  in  the  forces  producing 
these  living  jewels.  And  there  are  birdlike  fishes  with 
feathery  forms,  that  one  might  expect  to  sing  as  they 
cleave  the  firmament  of  water :  some  song  less  troubling 
than  the  Lorelei's,  with  liquid  gurgles  and  notes  of  bub- 
bling joy.  And  the  sea,  not  content  to  be  imitative,  has 
added  —  over  and  above  its  invention  of  the  fish  —  to  the 
great  palpitation  of  life ;  priestly  forms,  robed  and  cowled, 


22  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

silver-dusty  pillars,  half-shut  parasols.  Even  the  common 
crab  is  an  original ;  a  homely  grotesque  with  no  terraceous 
or  aerial  analogue,  particularly  as  it  floats  in  a  happy 
colour-harmony  with  a  brown  or  red  sponge  on  its  back,  a 
parasite  literally  sponging  upon  it.  But  though  you  may 
look  in  vain  for  mermaid  or  Lorelei,  naiad  or  nymph,  there 
is  no  reason  in  Nature  why  all  that  poets  feigned  should 
not  come  into  being.  The  water-babe  might  have  been  as 
easily  evolved  as  the  earth-man,  the  hegemony  of  creation 
might  have  been  won  by  an  aquatic  creature  with  an 
accidental  spurt  of  grey  matter,  and  the  history  of  civilisa- 
tion misrht  have  been  writ  in  water.  The  merman  is  a 
mere  amphibian,  not  arrived.  The  grj^phon  and  the 
centaur  are  hybrids  unborn.  'Tis  just  a  fluke  that  these 
particular  patterns  of  the  kaleidoscope  have  not  been 
thrown.  We  may  safely  await  evolutions.  The  winged 
genius  of  the  Romans,  frequent  enough  on  Pompeian 
frescoes,  may  even  be  developed  on  this  side  of  the  skies, 
and  we  may  fly  with  sprouted  wings  and  not  merely  with 
detachable.  Puck  and  Ariel  perchance  already  frisk  in 
some  Patagonian  forest,  Caliban  may  be  basking  in  forgotten 
mud.  Therefore,  poets,  trust  yourself  to  life  and  the  ful- 
ness thereof.  Whether  you  follow  Nature's  combinations 
or  precede  them,  you  may  create  fearlessly.  From  the 
imitatio  Naturoe  you  cannot  escape,  whether  you  steal  her 
combinations  or  her  elements. 

Shelley  sings  of  "  Death  and  his  brother  Sleep,"  but 
gazing  at  this  mystic  marine  underworld  of  the  Naples 
Aquarium,  I  would  sing  of  Life  and  his  brother  Sleep. 
For  here  are  shown  the  strange  beginnings  of  things,  half 
sleep,  half  waking  :  organisms  rooted  at  one  point  like 
flowers,  yet  groping  out  with  tendrils  towards  life  and 
consciousness  —  the  not  missing  link  between  animal  and 
vegetable  life.  What  feeling  comes  to  trouble  this  mys- 
tic doze,  stir  this  comatose  consciousness  ?  The  jelly-fish 
that  seems  a  mere  embodied  pulse — a  single  note  replacing 


FANTASIA  NAPOLITANA  23 

the  quadruple  chord  of  life  —  is  yet  a  complex  organism 
compared  with  some  that  flit  and  flitter  half  invisibly  in 
this  green  univei'se  of  theirs  :  threads,  insubstantialities, 
smoke  spirals,  shadowy  filaments  on  the  threshold  of  ex- 
istence, ghostly  fibres,  flashing  films,  visible  only  by  the 
beating  of  their  white  corpuscles.  'Tis  reading  the 
Book  of  Genesis,  verse  by  verse.  And  then  suddenly  a 
hitherto  unseen  entity,  the  octopus,  looses  its  sinuous 
suckers  from  the  rock  to  which  its  hue  protectively  assim- 
ilates —  a  Darwinian  observation  Lucian  anticipated  in 
his  "  Dialogue  of  Proteus  "  —  and  unfolding  itself  in  all 
its  manifold  horror,  steals  upon  its  prey  with  swift,  melo- 
dramatic strides. 

From  the  phantasmal  polyzoa  to  these  creatures  of 
violent  volition  how  great  the  jump  !  Natura  7ion  facit 
saltum,  forsooth  !  She  is  a  veritable  kangaroo.  From 
the  unconscious  to  the  conscious,  from  the  conscious  to  the 
self-conscious,  from  the  self-conscious  to  the  overcon- 
scious,  there's  a  jump  at  every  stage,  as  between  ice 
and  water,  water  and  steam.  Continuous  as  are  her 
phases,  a  mysteriously  new  set  of  conditions  emerges  with 
every  crossed  Rubicon.  Dante,  in  making  the  human 
embryo  pass  through  the  earlier  genetic  stages  ("  Purga- 
tory," Canto  XXV.),  seems  curiously  in  harmony  with 
modern  thought,  though  he  was  but  reproducing  Averroes. 

But  mankind  has  never  forgotten  its  long  siesta  as  a 
vegetable.  Still  linked  with  the  world  of  sleep  through 
the  mechanic  processes  of  nutrition,  respiration,  circulation, 
consciously  alive  only  in  his  higher  centres,  man  tends 
ever  to  drowse  back  to  the  primal  somnolence.  Moving 
along  the  lines  of  least  resistance  and  largest  comfort,  he 
steeps  himself  in  the  poppies  of  custom,  drinks  the  man- 
dragora  of  ready-made  morals,  and  sips  the  drowsy  syrups 
of  domesticity,  till  he  has  nigh  lapsed  back  to-  the  autom- 
aton. But  ever  and  anon  through  the  sluggish  doze 
stirs  the  elemental  dream,  leaps  the  primeval  fire,  and  man 


24  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

is  awake  and  astir  and  atlirill  for  crusades,  wars,  martyr- 
doms, revolutions,  reformations,  and  back  in  his  true  bio- 
logical genus. 

Not  only  in  man  appears  this  contest  of  life  and  sleep  : 
it  runs  through  the  cosmos.  There  is  a  drag-back  :  the 
ebb  of  the  flowing  tide.  How  soon  the  forsaken  town  re- 
turns to  forest  !  Near  the  Roman  Ghetto  you  may  note 
how  the  brickwork  of  the  wall  of  the  ancient  Tlieatre  of 
Marcellus  has  relapsed  to  rock  ;  man's  touch  swallowed 
up  in  the  mouldering  ruggedness,  the  houses  at  the  base 
merely  burrowed,  the  abodes  of  cave-dwellers. 

II 

I  saw  the  sea-serpent  at  Naples,  though  not  in  the 
Aquarium.  Its  colossal  bulk  was  humped  sinuously  along 
the  bay.  'Twas  the  Vesuvius  range,  stretching  mistily. 
Mariners  have  perchance  constructed  the  monster  from 
such  hazy  glimpses  of  distant  reefs.  Still,  no  dragon  has 
wrought  more  havoc  than  this  mountain,  which  smokes 
imperturbably  while  the  generations  rise  and  fall.  Beauti- 
ful the  smoke,  too,  when  it  grows  golden  in  the  setting 
sun,  and  the  monstrous  mass  turns  a  marvellous  purple. 
We  wonder  men  should  still  build  on  Vesuvius  —  betwixt 
the  devil  and  the  deep  sea  —  yet  the  chances  of  eruption 
are  no  greater  than  the  chances  of  epidemic  in  less  salu- 
brious places,  as  the  plague-churches  of  Italy  testify. 

But  should  a  new  eruption  overwhelm  Pompeii,  and  its 
first  record  be  lost,  there  were  a  strange  puzzle  for  the 
antiquarians  of  the  fiftieth  century  exhuming  its  cosmo- 
politan population  ;  blonde  German  savages  in  white  pot- 
hats,  ancient  Britons  in  tweeds,  extinct  American  cycle- 
centaurs  ;  incongruously  resident  amid  the  narrow  streets 
and  wide  public  buildings  of  a  prehistoric  Roman  civilisa- 
tion. 

Pompeii  is  buried  some  twenty  feet  deep.  The  Middle 
Ages  walked  over  these  entombed  streets  and  temples  and 


FANTASIA  NAPOLITANA  25 

suspected  nothing.  But  all  towns  are  built  on  their  dead 
past,  for  earth's  crust  renews  itself  as  incessantly  as  our 
own  skin.  We  walk  over  our  ancestors.  There  are 
twenty-seven  layers  of  human  life  at  Rome. 

It  needs  no  earth-convulsions,  no  miracles  of  lava. 
One  generation  of  cities  succeeds  another.  Nature,  a 
pious  Andromache,  covers  up  their  remains  as  softly  as 
the  snow  falls  or  the  grass  grows.  When  man  uncovers 
them  again,  he  finds  stratum  below  stratum,  city  below 
city,  as  though  the  whole  were  some  quaint  American 
structure  of  many  storeys  which  the  earth  had  swallowed 
at  a  single  gulp,  and  not  with  her  stately  deglutition. 
At  Gezer  in  Palestine  Macalister  has  been  dissecting  a 
tumulus  which  holds  layers  of  human  history  as  the  rocks 
hold  layers  of  earth-history.  Scratch  the  mound  and  you 
find  the  traces  of  an  Arab  city,  slice  deeper  and  'tis  a 
Crusaders'  city ;  an  undercut  brings  you  to  the  Roman 
city  whence  —  by  another  short  cut — 3"0U  descend  to  the 
Old  Testament  ;  to  the  city  that  was  dowered  to  Solomon's 
Egyptian  Queen,  to  the  Philistine  city,  and  so  to  the 
Canaanite  city.  But  even  here  Gezer  is  but  at  its  prime. 
You  have  sunk  through  all  the  Christian  era,  through  all 
the  Jewish  era,  but  fifteen  centuries  still  await  your  de- 
scent. Down  you  delve  —  through  the  city  captured  by 
Thotmes  III.,  through  the  city  of  the  early  Semites,  till 
at  last  your  pick  strikes  the  Hivites  and  the  Amorites, 
the  cave-men  of  the  primitive  Gezer.  Infinitely  solemn 
such  a  tumulus  in  its  imperturbable  chronicling,  with  its 
scarabs  and  altars,  its  spear-heads  and  its  gods,  the  bones 
of  its  foundation-sacrifices  yet  undecayed.  The  Judgment 
Books  need  no  celestial  clerks,  no  recording  angels ;  earth 
keeps  them  as  she  rolls.  In  our  eyes,  too,  as  we  gaze  upon 
this  ant-heap  of  our  breed,  a  thousand  years  are  but  as  a 
day — nay,  as  a  dream  that  passeth  in  the  night.  We  are 
such  stuff  as  dreams  are  made  on,  and  our  little  life  is 
rounded  with  a  mound.     Beside  Gezer,  Pompeii  and  Her- 


26  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

culaneiim  are  theatrical,  flamboyant,  the  creatures  of  a 
day,  the  parvenus  of  the  underworld. 

Mentally,  too,  strange  ancestral  strata  lie  in  our  deeps, 
even  as  the  remains  of  an  alimentary  canal  run  through 
our  spine  and  a  primitive  eye  lies  in  the  middle  of  our 
brain — that  pineal  gland  in  which  Descartes  located  the 
soul.  Sometimes  we  stumble  over  an  old  prejudice  or  a 
primitive  emotion,  prick  ourselves  with  an  arrow  of  an- 
cestral conscience,  and  tremble  with  an  ancient  fear. 
Mayhap  in  slumber  we  descend  to  these  regions,  explor- 
ing below  our  consciousness  and  delving  in  the  catacombs 
of  antiquity. 

The  destruction  of  Pompeii  was  effected,  however,  not 
by  Vesuvius,  but  by  the  antiquarian.  He  it  was  to  whom 
Pompeii  fell  as  a  spoil,  he  who  turned  Pompeii  from  a 
piece  of  life  to  a  piece  of  learning,  by  transporting  most  of 
its  treasures  to  a  museum.  The  word  is  surely  short  for 
mausoleum.  For  objects  in  a  museum  are  dead,  their 
relations  with  life  ended.  Objects  partake  of  the  lives  of 
their  possessors,  and  when  cut  off  are  as  dead  as  finger- 
nails. A  vase  dominating  the  court  of  a  Pompeian  house 
and  a  vase  in  the  Naples  Museum  are  as  a  creature  to  its 
skeleton.  What  a  stimulation  in  the  one  or  two  houses 
left  with  their  living  reality  —  their  frescoes  and  their 
furniture,  their  kitchens  and  middens  !  'Tis  statues  that 
suffer  most  from  their  arrangement  in  ghostly  rows.  A 
statue  is  an  aesthetic  climax,  the  crown  of  a  summit,  the 
close  of  a  vista.  See  that  sunlit  statue  of  Meleager  in  the 
grounds  of  the  Villa  Medici,  at  the  end  of  a  green  avenue, 
with  pillar  and  architrave  for  background,  and  red  and 
white  roses  climbing  around  it,  and  imagine  how  its  glory 
would  be  shorn  in  a  gallery.  The  French  have  remem- 
bered to  put  the  Venus  of  Milo  at  the  end  of  a  long  Louvre 
corridor,  which  she  fills  with  her  far-seen  radiance.  These 
collections  of  Capolavori — these  Apollos  and  Jupiters, 
and  Venuses   and  Muses,  dumped  as  close  as  cemetery 


FANTASIA  NAPOLITANA  27 

monuments  —  are  indeed  petrified.  The  fancy  must  resur- 
rect them  into  their  living  relations  with  halls  and  court- 
yards, temples  and  piazzas,  shrines  and  loggias.  The 
learned  begin  to  suspect  that  the  polytheism  of  Greece 
and  Rome  is  due  to  the  analogous  aggregation  of  local 
gods,  each  a  self-sufficing  and  all-powerful  divinity  in  its 
own  district.  When  there  were  so  many  deities,  their 
functions  had  to  be  differentiated,  as  we  give  a  different 
shade  of  meaning  to  two  words  for  the  same  thing.  Were 
one  to  collect  the  many  Madonnas  in  Italy,  one  might 
imagine  Christianity  as  polytheistic  as  Paganism. 

But  the  most  perfect  visualising  of  a  god's  statue  in  its 
local  setting  will  not  annul  that  half -death  which  sets  in 
with  the  statue's  loss  of  worship.  These  fair  visions  of 
Pallas  and  Juno,  shall  they  ever  touch  us  as  they  touched 
the  pious  Pagan  ?  Nay,  not  all  our  sense  of  lovely  line 
and  spiritual  grace  can  replace  that  departed  touch  of 
divinity. 

The  past  has  indeed  its  glamour  for  us,  which  serves 
perhaps  as  compensation  for  what  we  lose  of  the  hot 
reality,  but  an  inevitable  impiety  clings  to  our  inquisitive 
regard,  to  our  anxious  exhumation  of  its  secrets.  Unless 
we  go  to  it  with  our  emotions  as  well  as  our  intellect, 
prepared  to  extract  its  spiritual  significance  and  to  warm 
ourselves  at  the  fire  of  its  life  and  pour  a  libation  to  the 
gods  of  its  hearth,  a  wilderness  of  archseological  lore  will 
profit  us  little.  A  man  is  other  than  his  garments  and  a 
people  than  its  outworn  shell. 

There  is  perhaps  more  method  than  appears  at  first 
sight  in  the  madness  of  the  Turk,  who  reluctantly  permits 
the  scientific  explorer  to  dig  up  the  past  but  insists  that 
once  he  has  unearthed  his  historic  treasure,  his  buried 
streets  and  temples,  ay,  of  old  Jerusalem  itself,  he  shall 
cover  them  up  again.  The  dead  past  is  to  bury  its  dead. 
Death,  whether  in  citizens  or  their  cities,  is  sacred.  Cursed 
be  he  who  turns  up  their  bones  to  the  sun.     And  who  will 


28  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

not  sigh  over  the  mummies,  doomed  to  be  served  up  in 
museums  after  five  thousand  years  of  dignified  death? 
Princesses  and  potentates  were  they  in  their  lives ;  how 
coukl  they  dream,  as  they  were  borne  in  their  purpureal 
litters  through  the  streets  of  the  Pharaohs,  that  they 
would  make  a  spectacle  for  barbarians  on  wet  half-holi- 
days ?  And  thou,  Timhotpu,  prefect  of  the  very  Necro- 
polis of  Thebes  in  the  eighteenth  dynasty,  how  couldst 
thou  suspect  that  even  thy  gilded  sarcophagus  would  be 
violated,  thy  golden  earrings  wrenched  off,  thy  mortuary 
furniture  stolen,  and  thy  fine  figure  exhibited  to  me  in  the 
Turin  Museum,  turned  into  a  grey  char  under  thy  winding- 
sheet  !  The  very  eggs  placed  in  the  tombs  of  thy  ceme- 
tery have  kept  their  colour  better :  one  feels  that  under 
heat  they  might  still  hatch  a  hieroglyphic  chicken.  But 
thou  art  for  evermore  desiccated  and  done  with. 

Saddest  of  all  is  the  fate  of  the  immortals  :  goddesses 
of  the  hearth  and  gods  of  the  heaven  are  alike  swept  into 
the  museum-limbo.  They  are  shrunk  to  mythology,  they 
who  once  charioted  the  constellations.  For  mythology 
dogs  all  theologies,  and  one  god  after  another  is  put  on 
the  bookshelf. 

All  roads  lead  to  the  museum.  Thither  go  our  old 
clothes,  our  old  coins,  our  old  creeds,  and  we  wonder 
that  men  should  ever  have  worn  steel  armour  or  cast-iron 
dogmas.  Gazing  at  the  Pompeian  man,  that  "  cunning 
cast  in  clay,"  whose  clutch  at  his  money-bags  survives  his 
bodily  investiture,  who  does  not  feel  as  one  from  another 
planet  surveying  an  earth  pygmy  ?  What  strange  limited 
thoughts  were  thine,  O  Pompeian  of  the  first  century  ! 
I  warrant  thou  hadst  not  even  heard  of  the  Man  of 
Nazareth :  how  small  thine  atlas  of  the  world,  not  to  say 
thy  chart  of  the  heavens !  Poor  ignoramus  —  so  unac- 
quainted with  all  that  hath  happened  since  thy  death! 
How  wise  and  weighty  thou  wast  at  thy  table,  recumbent 
amidst  thy  roses,  surrounded  by  those  gay  frescoes  of 


FANTASIA  NAPOLITANA  29 

Cupids  and  Venuses ;  with  what  self-satisfaction  thou 
didst  lay  down  the  Roman  law,  garlanded  as  to  thy  nar- 
row forehead ! 

But  if  'tis  easy  to  play  the  Superman  with  this  fusty 
provincial,  'tis  not  hard  to  smell  the  museum  must  in  our 
own  living  world.  Too  many  people  and  things  do  not 
know  they  are  essentially  of  the  museum  :  have  the  arro- 
gance to  imagine  they  are  contemporary.  How  full  of  life 
seems  the  cannon  as  it  belches  death  !  Yet  'tis  but  an  un- 
couth, noisy  creature,  long  since  outgrown  and  outmoded 
among  the  humanised  citizens  of  the  planet  ;  some  day  it 
will  be  hunted  out  like  the  wolf  and  the  boar,  with  a  price 
upon  its  mouth. 

'Tis  to  the  stage  that  extinct  human  types  betake  them- 
selves by  way  of  after-life  —  the  theatre  serving  as  the 
anthropological  museum  —  but  there  are  some  that  linger 
unconscionably  on  this  side  of  the  footlights.  Bigots,  for 
example,  have  an  air  of  antediluvian  bipeds,  monstrous 
wildfowl  that  flap  and  shriek.  I  even  gaze  curiously 
at  Gold  Sticks  and  pages  of  the  Presence.  They  are  be- 
come spectacular,  and  to  be  spectacular  is  to  be  well  on 
the  way  to  the  museum.  Mistrust  the  spasmodic  splen- 
dour —  leap  of  the  dying  flame.  Where  traditions  must 
be  pored  over,  and  performers  rehearsed,  it  has  become  a 
play;  is  propped  on  precedent  instead  of  uplifted  by  sap. 
The  passion  for  ritual  is  one  of  the  master-passions  of  hu- 
manity. Yet  stage  properties  can  never  return  to  the 
world  of  reality.  The  profession  will  tell  you  that  they 
are  sold  off  to  inferior  theatres,  never  to  the  real  world 
outside.  What  passes  into  the  museum  can  never  repass 
the  janitor. 

On  the  leaders  of  life  lies  in  each  generation  the  duty 
of  establishing  the  museum-point.  The  museum-point  in 
thought,  art,  morals.  No  matter  that  obsolete  modes  pre- 
vail in  the  vulgar  world  :  do  the  ladies  allow  the  mob  to 
dictate  their  fashions  ?     Hath  a  bonnet  existence  because 


30  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

it  survives  in  Seven  Dials  or  the  Bowery  ?  Is  a  creed  alive 
because  it  flourishes  in  Little  Bethel  ?  Man  is  one  vast 
being,  and  the  thought  of  his  higher  nerve-centres  alone 
counts  :  generation  hands  the  torch  to  generation. 
Doubtless  the  lower  ganglia  are  not  always  ready  for  the 
new  conception.  But  such  considerations  belong  to 
Politics,  not  to  Truth.  At  the  worst  the  map  must  be 
made  while  the  march  is  preparing. 

Ill 

No  object  in  the  Naples  Museum  fascinates  the  philo- 
sophic mind  more  than  Salpion's  vase.  Who  was  Salpion  ? 
I  know  not,  though  his  once  living  hand  signed  his  work, 
in  bold  sprawling  letters, 

SAAniQN  A0HNAIO2  EHOIHSE 

An  Athenian  made  you,  then,  I  muse,  gazing  upon  its 
beautiful  marble  impassivity,  and  studying  the  alto-relievo 
of  Mercury  with  his  dancing  train  giving  over  the  infant 
Bacchus  to  a  seated  nymph  of  Nysa.  He  who  conceived 
you  made  you  for  sacrifices  to  Bacchus,  lived  among 
those  white  temples  which  the  Greeks  built  for  the  adora- 
tion of  their  gods,  but  which  remain  for  our  adoration. 
He  mounted  that  hill  agleam  with  the  marble  pillars  of 
immortal  shrines,  he  passed  the  Areopagus,  and  the  altar 
"  to  the  unknown  God "  ;  he  entered  the  Propylsea  and 
gazed  through  the  columns  of  the  Acropolis  upon  the  blue 
^gean.  He  sat  in  that  marmoreal  amphitheatre  and  saw 
the  mimes  in  sock  and  buskin  take  the  proscenium  to  the 
sound  of  lyres  and  flutes.  Perchance  'twas  while  seeing 
the  Mercury  fable  treated  in  a  choric  dance  in  the  sanded 
orchestra  that  he  composed  this  grouping.  Perhaps  he 
but  copied  it  from  some  play  lost  to  us,  for  the  Greek 
theatre,  with  its  long  declamations,  had  more  analogy 
with  sculpture  than  with  our  agitated  drama  of  to-day. 


FANTASIA  NAPOLITANA  31 

The  legend  itself  is  in  Lucian  and  Apollonius.  But 
Salpion  is  not  the  beginning  of  this  vase's  story.  For 
the  artist  himself  belonged  to  the  Renaissance,  the  scholars 
say  ;  not  our  Renaissance,  but  a  neo-Attic.  Salpion  did 
but  deftly  reproduce  the  archaic  traditions  of  the  first 
great  period  of  Greek  sculpture.  Even  in  those  days 
men's  thoughts  turned  yearningly  to  a  nobler  past,  and 
the  young  prix  de  Rome  who  should  find  inspiration  in 
Salpion  would  be  but  imitating  an  imitation.  Nor  is 
Athenian  all  the  history  this  fair  Attic  shape  has  held. 
Much  more  we  know,  yet  much  is  dim.  In  what  palace 
or  private  atrium  did  it  pass  its  first  years  ?  How  did  it 
travel  to  Italy  ?  Was  it  exported  thither  by  a  Greek 
merchant  to  adorn  the  house  of  some  rich  provincial,  or 

—  more  probably  —  the  country  seat  of  a  noble  Roman  ? 
For  the  ruins  of  Formise  were  the  place  of  its  discovery, 
and  mayhap  Cicero  himself  —  the  baths  of  whose  villa 
some  think  to  trace  in  the  grounds  of  the  Villa  Caposele 

—  was  its  whilom  proprietor. 

But,  once  recovered  from  the  wrack  of  the  antique 
world,  it  falls  into  indignity,  more  grievous  than  its  long 
inhumation  through  the  rise  and  fall  of  the  mediseval  world. 
It  drifts,  across  fields  of  asphodel,  to  the  neighbouring 
Gaeta  —  the  Gibraltar  of  Italy,  the  ancient  Portus  Gaeta^ 
itself  a  town-republic  of  as  many  mutations  and  glories  — 
and  there,  stuck  in  the  harbour  mud,  performs  the  function 
of  a  post  to  which  boats  are  fastened.  Stalwart  fishermen, 
wearing  gold  earrings,  push  off  from  it  with  swarthy 
hands  ;  bronzed  women,  with  silver  bodkins  pinning  in 
their  back  hair  with  long  coils  of  many-coloured  linen, 
throw  their  ropes  over  its  pedestal.  Year  after  year  it 
lies  in  its  ooze  while  the  sun  rises  and  sets  in  glory  on  the 
promontory  of  Gaeta:  it  reeks  of  tar  and  the  smell  of  fish- 
ing-nets ;  brine  encrusts  its  high-reliefs.  The  clatter  of 
the  port  drowns  the  hollow  cry  of  memory  that  comes 
when  it  is  struck  by  an  oar  :  there  is  the  noise  of  shipping 


32  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

bales ;  the  crews  of  forth-faring  argosies  heave  anchor 
with  their  ancient  chant;  the  sails  of  the  galleons  flap  ; 
the  windlasses  creak.  Perchance  a  galley-slave,  flayed 
and  fretted  by  chain  and  lash,  draws  up  with  grappled 
boat-hook,  and  his  blood  flows  over  into  Salpion's  vase. 

And  then  a  tide  of  happier  fortune  —  perhaps  the  same 
that  bore  the  Sardinians  to  the  conquest  of  Gaeta  and  the 
end  of  the  war  for  Italian  independence — washes  the  vase 
from  its  harbour  mud  and  deposits  it  in  the  cathedral  of 
Gaeta.  Tlie  altar  of  Bacchus  returns  to  sacerdotal  uses  : 
only  now  it  is  a  font,  and  brown  Italian  babies  are  soused 
in  it,  while  nurses  in  gilt  coronets  with  trailing  orange 
ribbons  stand  by,  radiant.  Doubtless  the  priests  and  the 
simple  alike  read  an  angel  into  Mercury,  the  infant  Jesus 
into  the  child  of  Jupiter  and  Semele,  and  into  the  nymph 
of  Nysa  the  Madonna  whose  Immaculate  Conception  Pio 
Nono  proclaimed  from  this  very  Gaeta. 

Its  Bacchantes  are  now  joyous  saints,  divinely  uplifted. 
And  why  not  ?  Is  not  the  Church  of  Santa  Costanza  at 
Rome  the  very  temple  of  Bacchus  its  Bacchic  processions 
in  mosaic  and  fresco  unchanged  ?  Did  not  the  early 
Church  make  the  Bacchic  rites  symbolic  of  the  vineyard  of 
the  faith,  and  turn  to  angels  the  sportive  genii  ?  Assuredly 
Salpion's  vase  is  as  Christian  as  the  toe  of  Jupiter  in  St. 
Peter's,  as  the  Roman  basilica3  where  altars  have  usurped 
the  ancient  judgment-seat,  as  the  Pantheon  wrested  from 
the  gods  by  the  saints.  Nay,  its  Bacchic  relief  might  have 
been  the  very  design  of  a  Cinquecento  artist  for  a  papal 
patron,  the  figures  serving  for  saints,  even  as  the  Venetian 
ladies  in  all  their  debonair  beauty  supplied  Tintoretto  and 
Titian  with  martyrs  and  holy  virgins,  or  as  the  beautiful, 
solemn-robed,  venerable-bearded  Bacchus  on  another 
ancient  vase,  which  stands  in  the  Campo  Santo  of  Pisa, 
served  Niccolo  Pisano  for  the  High  Priest  of  his  pulpit 
reliefs. 

Outside  Or  San  Michele  in  Florence  you  may  admire 


FANTASIA  NAPOLITANA  33 

the  Four  Holy  Craftsmen,  early  Roman  Christians 
martyred  for  refusing  to  make  Pagan  deities.  They  had 
not  yet  learned  to  baptize  them  by  other  names. 

And  now  Salpion's  vase  has  reached  the  Museum,  that 
cynosure  of  wandering  tourists.  But  it  belongs  not  truly 
to  the  world  of  glass  cases  :  it  has  not  yet  reached  museum- 
point.  It  is  of  the  Exhibition  :  not  of  the  Museum 
proper,  which  should  be  a  collection  of  antiquities.  Other 
adventures  await  it,  dignified  or  sordid.  For  museums 
themselves  die  and  are  broken  up.  Proteus  had  to  change 
his  shape  ;  Salpion's  vase  has  no  need  of  external  trans- 
formations. Will  it  fume  with  incense  to  some  yet  un- 
known divinity  in  the  United  States  of  Africa,  or  serve  as 
a  spittoon  for  the  Fifth  President  of  the  Third  World- 
Republic  ? 

O  the  passing,  the  mutations,  the  lapse,  the  decay  and 
fall,  and  the  tears  of  things  !  Yet  Salpion's  vase  remains 
as  beautiful  for  baptism  as  for  Pagan  ritual  ;  symbol  of 
art  which  persists,  stable  and  sure  as  the  sky,  while 
thoughts  and  faiths  pass  and  re-form,  like  clouds  on  the 
blue. 

And  out  of  this  flux  man  has  dared  to  make  a  legend  of 
changelessness,  when  at  most  he  may  one  day  determine 
the  law  of  the  flux. 

Everything  changes  but  change.  Yet  man's  heart  de- 
mands perfections  —  I  had  almost  said  petrifications  — 
perfect  laws,  perfect  truths,  dogmas  beyond  obsolescence, 
flawless  leaders,  unsullied  saints,  knights  without  fear 
or  reproach  ;  throws  over  its  idols  for  the  least  speck  of 
clay,  and  loses  all  sense  of  sanctity  in  a  truth  whose 
absoluteness  for  all  time  and  place  is  surrendered. 

Yet  is  there  something  touching  and  significant  in  this 
clinging  of  man  to  Platonic  ideals  :  the  ruder  and  simpler 
he,  the  more  indefectible  his  blessed  vision,  the  more 
shining  his  imaged  grail.  And  so  in  this  shifting  world 
of  eternal  flux  his  greatest  emotions  and  cravings  have 


34  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

gathered  round  that  ideal  of  eternal  persistence  that   is 
named  God. 

IV 

There  are  two  torrents  that  amaze  me  to  consider  —  the 
one  is  Niagara,  and  the  other  the  stream  of  prayer  falling 
perpetually  in  the  Roman  Catholic  Church.  What  with 
masses  and  the  circulating  exposition  of  the  Host,  there  is 
no  day  nor  moment  of  the  day  in  which  the  praises  of  God 
are  not  being  sung  somewhere  :  in  noble  churches,  in  dim 
crypts  and  underground  chapels,  in  cells  and  oratories. 
I  have  been  in  a  great  cathedral,  sole  congregant,  and,  lo  ! 
the  tall  wax  candles  were  lit,  the  carven  stalls  were  full  of 
robed  choristers,  the  organ  rolled  out  its  sonorous  phrases, 
the  priests  chanted,  marching  and  bowing,  the  censer 
swung  its  incense,  the  bell  tinkled.  Niagara  is  indifferent 
to  spectators,  and  so  the  ever-falling  stream  of  prayer. 
As  steadfastly  and  unremittingly  as  God  sustains  the 
universe,  so  steadfastly  and  unremittingly  is  He  acknow- 
ledged, the  human  antiphony  answering  the  divine  strophe. 
There  be  those  who  cannot  bear  that  Niagara  should 
fall  and  thunder  in  mere  sublimity,  but  only  to  such  will 
this  falling  thunder  of  prayer  seem  waste. 

Yet  as  I  go  through  these  innumerable  dark  cliurches 
of  Italy,  these  heavy,  airless  glooms,  heavier  with  the 
sense  of  faded  frescoes  and  worm-eaten  pictures,  and  vaults 
and  crypts,  and  mouldering  frippery  and  mildewed  relics, 
and  saintly  bones  mocked  by  jewelled  shroudings,  and 
dim-burning  oil-lamps  —  the  blue  sky  of  Italy  shut  out  as 
in  a  pious  perversity  —  and  more,  when  I  see  the  sub- 
jects of  the  paintings  and  gravings,  these  Crucifixions  and 
Entombments  and  Descents  from  the  Cross,  varied  by  the 
mimetic  martyrdoms  of  the  lirst  believers,  it  is  borne  in  on 
me  depressingly  how  the  secret  of  Jesus  has  been  darkened, 
and  a  doctrine  of  life  —  "  Walk  while  ye  have  the  light 
.     .     .    that  ye  may  be  the  children  of  light  "  —  has  been 


FANTASIA  NAPOLITANA  35 

turned  to  a  doctrine  of  death.  St.  Sebastian  with  his 
arrows,  St.  Lawrence  with  his  gridiron,  are,  no  doubt,  sub- 
lime spectacles,  but  had  not  the  martyr's  life  been  noble, 
and  had  lie  not  died  for  the  right  to  live  it,  his  death 
would  have  been  merely  ignominious.  The  death  of 
Socrates  owes  its  value  to  the  life  of  Socrates.  Many  a 
murderer  dies  as  staunchly,  not  to  speak  of  the  noble  ex- 
perimenters with  Rontgen  rays,  or  the  explorers  who  perish 
in  polar  wastes,  recording  with  freezing  fingers  the  latitude 
of  their  death. 

Painting  half  obeyed,  half  fostered  this  concentration 
on  the  Passion,  with  its  strong  lights  and  shadows.  In- 
deed, the  artistic  strength  of  the  mere  story  is  so  tremen- 
dous that  it  has  wiped  out  the  message  of  the  Master  and 
thrown  Christianity  quite  out  of  perspective.  Tintoretto's 
frescoes  in  San  Rocco — -indeed,  most  sacred  pictures  — 
are  like  a  picture-book  for  the  primitive.  Q'-Picturce  sunt 
idiotarum  lihri.''''')  The  anecdotal  Christ  alone  survives. 
And  the  painters  were  the  journalists,  the  diffusers  and 
interpreters  of  ideas. 

The  true  Christ  was  crucified  afresh  in  the  interests  of 
romance  and  the  pictorial  nude.  Crivelli  painted  with 
unction  the  fine  wood  and  the  decorative  nails  of  the 
Cross  ;  even  the  winding-sheet  is  treated  by  Giulio  Clovio 
for  its  decorative  value.  Where  in  all  these  galleries  and 
legends  shall  we  find  the  living  Christ,  the  Christ  of  the 
parables  and  the  paradoxes,  the  caustic  satirist,  the  prophet 
of  righteousness,  the  lover  of  little  children  ?  The  living 
Christ  was  overcast  by  the  livid  light  of  the  tomb.  He 
was  buried  in  the  Latin  of  the  Church,  while  every  chapel 
and  cloister  taught  in  glaring  colour  the  superficial 
dramatic  elements,  and  Calvaries  were  built  to  accentuate 
it,  and  men  fought  for  the  Cross  and  swore  by  the  Holy 
Rood,  and  collected  the  sacred  nails  and  fragments  of  the 
wood  and  thorns  of  the  crown. 

The  Sacro  Catino  of  Genoa  Cathedral  once  held  drops  of 


36  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

the  blood ;  a  chapel  of  marble  and  gold  at  Turin  still  pre- 
serves in  the  glow  of  ever-burning  lamps  the  Santo  Sudario, 
or  Holy  Winding-sheet.  Strange  mementoes  of  the  plein 
air  Prophet  who  drew  his  parables  and  metaphors  from  the 
vineyard  and  the  sheepfold  !  The  Santo  Vol  to  for  which 
pilgrims  stream  to  Lucca  is  not  the  holy  face  of  loving 
righteousness,  but  a  crucifix  miraculously  migrated  from 
the  Holy  Land  and  preserved  in  a  toy  tempietto.  Of  the 
fifteen  mysteries  of  the  Roman  Catholic  Rosary,  five  are 
of  Birth,  five  of  Death,  five  of  Glory.  But  none  are  of 
Life.  There  are  also  the  rosaries  of  the  Five  Wounds 
and  the  Seven  Dolors. 

No  doubt  the  majestic  and  sombre  symbolism  of  the 
Cross  owed  its  power  over  gross  minds  to  its  very  repudi- 
ation of  the  joy  of  life,  but  the  soul  cannot  healthily  con- 
centrate on  death,  nor  can  "  Holy  Dying  "  replace  "  Holy 
Living."  Those  early  purple  and  gold  mosaics  of  the 
Master  with  His  hand  on  the  Book  of  Life,  placed  over 
altars, — as  in  the  cathedral  of  Pisa,  —  taught,  for  all  their 
naivete,  the  deeper  lesson:  "jE'</o  sum  lux  mundi.'''  The 
rude  stone  sculptures  on  the  portals  of  Parma  Baptistery 
depict  a  Christ  grotesque  in  a  skull-cap,  yet  active  in  works 
and  words  of  love,  and  Duccio's  panels  on  that  reredos  in 
Siena  in  the  dawn  of  Italian  art  equally  emphasise  the 
life  of  Christ,  and  not  its  mere  ending.  In  fact,  the  earlier 
the  art  the  less  the  insistence  on  darkness  and  death.  The 
Christians  of  the  Catacombs,  for  whom  death  and  darkness 
were  daily  realities,  turned  all  their  thoughts  to  light  and 
life.  They  enjoyed  their  crypts  more  than  the  Christians  of 
to-day  enjoy  their  cathedrals.  " '  The  Acts  of  the  Apostles,' " 
says  Renan  in  his  "  St.  Paul,"  "  are  a  book  of  joy."  It  was 
the  later  ages,  which  found  the  battle  won,  that  took  an 
artistic  and  morbid  pleasure  in  depicting  martyrdoms  and 
created  those  pictorial  concepts  that  tend  to  caricature 
Christianity.  It  is  worth  remarking  that  Tempesta,  who 
brought  pictorial  martyrology  to  its  disgusting  climax  in 


FANTASIA  NAPOLITANA  37 

S.  Stefano  Rotondo  at  Rome,  came  so  late  that  he  lived  to  see 
the  eighteenth  century  in.  A  pity  that  temporary  neces- 
sities of  martyrdom  among  the  early  Christians  lent  colour 
to  the  misconception  of  Christianity  as  a  religion  of  death. 
Toleration  or  triumph  robbed  the  saint  of  his  stake,  and 
left  to  him  a  subtler  and  severer  imitatio  CJiristi.  Buried 
so  long  beneath  his  own  Cross,  tlie  true  Christ  will  rise 
again  —  to  the  cry  of  '•'-Ecce  Homo  !  " 

On  that  day  the  teaching  of  Arius  as  to  the  originate 
nature  of  Christ,  or  the  model  trinitarianism  of  Sabellius 
by  which  the  same  God  manifested  Himself  as  Father,  Son, 
and  Holy  Ghost,  may  cease  to  be  a  heresy,  or  Joachim  of 
Flora's  expectation  of  a  Super-Gospel  of  the  Spirit  may 
find  transformed  fulfilment.  For  if  Christianity  has  a 
future,  that  future  belongs,  not  to  its  dogmas,  but  to  its 
heresies,  the  thought  of  the  great  souls  who,  instead  of  re- 
ceiving it  passively,  wrestled  for  themselves  with  its  meta- 
physical and  spiritual  problems,  and  passed  through  the 
white  fires  and  deep  waters  of  the  cosmic  mystery.  There 
is  scarcely  a  heresy  but  will  better  repay  study  than  the 
acrid  certainties  of  St.  Bernard  or  the  word-spinnings  of 
Athanasius  triumphant  contra  mundum. 

Art  is,  indeed,  not  sparing  of  the  resurrected  Christ  who 
rules  in  glory,  such  as  He  whose  majestic  figure  dominates 
and  pervades  St.  Mark's;  but  this  Christ  who  presides 
in  so  many  pictures  at  the  Last  Judgment,  His  foot  on  the 
earth-ball.  His  angel-legions  round  Him,  and  who,  indeed, 
in  some  is  actually  represented  as  creating  Adam  or  giving 
Moses  the  Law  ;  this  Christ  v\\o  —  by  a  paradoxical  re- 
version to  the  Pagan  need  for  a  human  God  —  has  super- 
seded His  Father  with  even  retrospective  rights,  is  still 
further  removed  than  the  crucified  Christ  from  the  Christ 
of  life. 

This  apotheosis,  how  inferior  in  grandeur  to  His  true  pre- 
sidence  over  the  centuries  that  followed  His  death  !  And 
this  death,  how  infinitely  more  tragic  than  the    conven- 


38  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

tional  theory  of  it  !  Naught  that  man  has  suffered  or  man 
imagined,  no  Dantesque  torture  or  Promethean  agony,  can 
equal  the  bhickness  of  that  ninth  hour  when  "  Jesus  cried 
with  a  loud  voice,  saying,  Eli^  Eli,  lama  sabachthanif^ 
Where  be  the  twelve  legions  of  angels,  where  the  seat  for 
the  Son  of  Man  at  the  right  hand  of  power  ?  Why  this 
mockery,  this  excruciation  ? 

Purblind  must  be  the  dryasdust  who  can  'read  this  pas- 
sage and  doubt  that  Jesus  was  an  historical  person.  As  if 
the  writers  of  Matthew  and  Mark  could  have  invented  so 
wonderful  a  touch,  or  would,  had  they  understood  its  full 
import,  have  inserted  so  flagrant  a  contradiction  of  the 
Christian  concept  —  a  contradiction  that  can  only  be  coun- 
teracted by  an  elaborate  theory  of  kenosis.  The  dying 
cry  of  Jesus  stamps  him  with  authenticity,  as  the  complaints 
of  the  Israelites  against  their  leader  guarantee  Moses  and 
the  Exodus. 

What  a  colossal  theme  —  Ormuzd  broken  by  Ahriman, 
the  incarnation  of  light  and  love  agonising  beneath  the 
heel  of  the  powers  of  darkness  and  goaded  into  the  supreme 
cry  :  "  My  God,  my  God,  why  hast  Thou  forsaken  me  ?  " 
I  have  seen  only  one  Crucifixion  that  adequately  renders 
this  dreadful  moment  —  the  supreme  loneliness,  the  un- 
rayed  blackness  —  for  most  Crucifixions  are  populated  and 
bustling,  like  Tintoretto's  or  Altichieri's  or  P'oppa's  or 
Spinello  Aretino's,  or  that  congested  canvas  of  the  brothers 
San  Severino,  when  they  are  not  also  like  Michele  da 
Verona's,  a  translation  of  the  tragedy  into  a  Carpaccio 
romance  of  trumpeters  and  horsemen  and  dogs  and  lovely 
towered  cities  and  mountain  bridges,  not  to  mention  the 
arms  of  the  magnificent  Conte  di  Pitigliano.  But  what 
painter  it  is  who  has  caught  the  true  essence  and  quiddity 
of  the  Crucifixion  I  cannot  remember,  nor  haply  if  I  saw  his 
picture  in  Spain  and  not  in  Italy,  nor  even  if  I  dreamed  it. 

Lucas  Van  der  Leyden  and  Van  Dyck  give  us  the  lonely 
figure,  but  in  Italian  art  before  our  own  day  I  can  only 


FANTASIA  NAPOLITANA  39 

recall  it  in  an  obscure  picture  of  the  Parmese  school,  and 
in  a  small  painting  of  the  eighteenth-century  Venetian, 
Piazzetta.  Tura's  impressive,  sombre  study  is  only  a 
fragment  of  a  stigmata  picture.  Guido  Reni  suggests  the 
loneliness,  but  he  leaves  the  head  haloed  and  melodramatic, 
besides  sketching  in  shadowy  accessories.  A  nineteenth- 
century  Italian,  Giocondo  Viglioli,  places  the  lonely 
Christ  against  the  shadowy  background  of  the  roofs  and 
towers  of  Jerusalem.  But  the  picture  I  have  in  my  mind 
is  Rembrandtesque,  the  blacks  heaviest  at  the  figure  in 
the  centre,  who,  unillumined  even  by  a  halo,  uncom- 
panioned  even  of  thieves,  hangs  nailed  upon  a  lonely  cross 
in  a  vast  deserted  landscape.  For  Jesus  at  this  tremen- 
dous moment  is  alone  —  however  vast  the  crowd  —  alone 
against  the  universe,  and  this  universe  has  turned  into 
a  darkness  that  can  be  felt  ;  felt  as  a  torment  of  body  as 
well  as  a  shattering  of  the  spirit. 

When  I  looked  upon  the  myth  of  Psyche  in  the  Villa  Far- 
nesina  at  Rome  as  designed  by  Raphael,  it  was  borne  in  on 
me  how  the  primitive  Greek,  penetrated  by  the  certainty 
and  beauty  of  his  body,  had  made  the  world  and  the  gods 
in  its  image.  But  the  race  of  Jesus,  evolved  to  a  higher 
thought,  had  demanded  that  the  universe  should  answer  to 
its  soul.  "  Shall  not  the  Judge  of  all  the  earth  do  right  ?  " 
asks  Abraham  severely  of  God  in  another  epochal  passage 
of  the  Bible.  And  now  here  is  a  scion  of  Abraham  who 
has  staked  his  all  upon  the  innermost  nature  of  things 
being  one  with  his  own,  upon  a  universe  aflame  with  love 
and  righteousness  and  pity,  and  lo  !  in  this  awful  hour  it 
seems  to  reveal  itself  as  a  universe  full  of  mocking  forces, 
grim,  imperturbable,  alien.  It  is  an  epic  moment  —  the 
tragedy  not  only  of  Jesus,  but  of  man  soaring  upwards 
from  the  slime  — 

"  Such  splendid  purpose  in  his  eyes  " 
—  and  finding  in  the  cosmos  no  correspondence  with  his 


40  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

vision.  Nor  could  Jesus,  who  had  outgrown  the  notion 
of  a  heavenly  despot,  even  find  the  satisfaction  of  the 
Prometheus  of  J^schylus  : 

"  You  see  me  fettered  here,  a  god  ill-starred, 
The  enemy  of  Zeus,  abhorred  of  all 
That  tread  the  courts  of  his  omnipotence, 
Because  of  mine  exceeding  love  for  men." 

Yet  in  a  sense  the  despair  of  Jesus  was  unwarranted. 
The  universe  had  not  forsaken  him  ;  ic  contained,  on  the 
contrary,  the  media  for  his  eternal  influence.  On  the 
physical  plane,  indeed,  it  could  do  nothing  for  him  ; 
crucifixion  must  kill  or  the  cosmos  must  change  to  chaos. 
But  on  the  spiritual  plane  he  could  neither  be  killed  nor 
forsaken.  Infinitely  less  tragic  his  death  than  that  of 
Napoleon,  of  whom  we  might  say,  in  the  words  of  Sanna- 

zaro, 

"Omnia  vincebas,  superabas  omnia  Caesar, 
Omnia  deficiunt,  incipis  esse  nihil." 

It  was  Moses  who  more  voluntarily  than  Jesus  offered 
his  life  that  the  equilibrium  of  this  righteous  universe 
should  not  be  shaken.  "  Ye  have  sinned  a  great  sin  ;  and 
now  I  will  go  up  unto  the  Lord ;  peradventure  I  shall 
make  an  atonement  for  your  sin."  And  the  atonement 
offered  ran :  "  Blot  me,  I  pray  Thee,  out  of  Thy  book 
which  Thou  hast  written."  Here,  then,  in  the  Old  Tes- 
tament, and  not  in  the  New,  first  appears  the  notion  of 
vicarious  atonement.  But  the  Old  Testament  sternly 
rejects  it ;  "  Whoever  hath  sinned  against  Me,  him  will  I 
blot  out  of  My  book."  Beside  which  trenchant  repudia- 
tion the  Christian  reading  of  the  Old  Testament  as  a  mere 
prolegomenon  to  the  Crucifixion,  an  avenue  to  Calvary 
strewn  with  textual  finger-posts,  appears  a  more  than  usu- 
ally futile  word-play  of  the  theological  mind.  One  might, 
indeed,  more  easily  discover  the  germ  of  the  atonement 
idea  in  Iphigenia.     And  that  the  Greek  mind  had  spirit- 


FANTASIA  NAPOLITANA  41 

ualised  itself  —  even  before  it  contributed  the  logos  to 
Christianity — is  obvious  not  only  from  its  literature  and 
its  Orphic  and  Eleusinian  mysteries,  but  from  its  art. 
For  the  Hellenic  art  of  Raphael  v^^as,  after  all,  only  the 
Renaissance  view  of  Hellas,  and  the  Greek  myths  in  his 
hands  were  merely  a  charming  Pagan  poetry,  no  truer  to 
the  Hellenism  of  the  great  period  than  was  the  "  Endy- 
mion"  or  "  Hyperion  "  of  Keats.  How  can  I  look  at  the 
statue  of  Apollo  in  this  same  Museum  of  Naples  and  not 
see  that  the  very  type  of  Christ  had  been  prefigured  ?  I 
mean  the  Christ  with  the  haunting  eyes  and  the  long 
ringlets,  for  this  Apollo  is  a  nobler  figure  by  far  than 
the  Christ  of  the  Byzantine  mosaics.  And  I  am  not 
the  first  to  remember  that  Apollo  is  the  Son  of  Zeus 
the  Father. 

It  is  very  strange.  The  Greeks,  beginning  with  a  Na- 
ture-religion, come  in  the  course  of  the  centuries  to  find  it 
inadequate  and  to  yearn  for  something  beyond  — 

"  Tendebantque  manus  ulterioris  ripse  amore." 

The  Nature-religion,  therefore,  gradually  replaces  itself 
by  a  Jewish  heresy,  expounded  in  Greek,  largely  influenced 
by  Greek  Alexandrian  philosophy,  and  organised  by  a 
Greek-speaking  tent-maker  of  Jerusalem  named  Saul  or 
Paul,  who,  shutting  out  infinity  with  a  tent,  after  the 
fashion  of  his  craft,  left  a  Church  where  he  had  found  a 
Christ.  Some  fourteen  centuries  later  old  Greek  thought 
is  rediscovered,  and  operates  as  the  great  liberator  of  the 
mind  from  the  constriction  of  this  Church  which  has  ob- 
scured and  overgloomed  Nature.  But  only  subconscious 
of  itself,  this  movement  back  to  Nature,  this  renewed 
joie  de  vivre,  finds  its  expression  in  the  adornment  of  altars 
for  the  worship  of  sorrow,  and  under  the  ribs  of  death  a 
new  soul  of  loveliness  is  created  that  can  vie  with  the  art 
of  the  Greeks.  And  finally  this  new  Nature-worship 
grows  conscious   again  of  its  inadequacy  to  the  soul  of 


42  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

man,  there  is  a  Reformation  and  a  Counter-Reformation, 
and  then  both  are  outgrown  and  humanity  stands  to-day 
where  the  old  Greeks  stood  at  the  dawn  of  Christianity. 
The  wheel  has  come  full  circle.  And  meantime  the 
original  Mosaic  cult  stands  unmoved  by  these  two  millen- 
niums of  heresy,  unbroken  by  the  persecution,  still  pa- 
tiently awaiting  the  day  when  "  God  shall  be  One  and  His 
Name  One."  What  are  the  fantasies  of  literature  to  the 
freaks  and  paradoxes  of  the  World-Spirit  ? 

V 

It  is  as  the  Bambino  that  Christ  chiefly  lives  in  Art, 
and  at  this  extreme,  too,  we  miss  his  true  inwardness. 
Yet  the  tenderness  of  the  conception  of  the  Christ-babe 
makes  atonement.  What  can  be  more  touching  than 
Gentile  da  Fabriano's  enchanting  altar-piece  of  the 
Adoration  of  the  3Iag%  in  which  —  even  as  the  glamorous 
procession  of  the  Three  Kings  resteeps  the  earth  in  the 
freshness  and  dew  of  the  morning  —  the  dominance  of 
holy  innocence  seems  to  bathe  the  tired  world  in  a  wistful 
tenderness  that  links  the  naive  ox  and  ass  with  the  human 
soul  and  all  the  great  chain  of  divine  life. 

The  Christ-child,  held  in  his  mother's  arms,  lays  his 
hand  upon  the  kneeling  Magi's  head,  yet  not  as  with 
conscious  divinity  :  'tis  merely  the  errant  touch  of  baby 
fingers  groping  out  towards  the  feel  of  things.  No  lesson 
could  be  more  emollient  to  rude  ages,  none  could  better 
serve  to  break  the  pride  and  harshness  of  the  lords  of  the 
earth.  "A  slave  might  be  elder,  priest,  or  bishop  while 
his  master  was  catechumen,"  says  Hausrath  of  the  early 
days  of  Christianity.  Yet  this  delicious  and  3^earning 
vision  of  a  sanctified  and  unified  cosmos  remains  a  dream  ; 
futile  as  a  Christmas  carol  that  breaks  sweetly  on  the  ear 
and  dies  away,  leaving  the  cry  of  the  world's  pain  undis- 
possessed.     It  was  precisely  in  Christian  Rome  that  sla- 


FANTASIA  NAPOLITANA  43 

very  endured  after  all  the  other  Great  Powers  of  Europe 
had  abolished  it. 

Nay,  were  the  dream  fulfilled  it  could  not  undo  the 
centuries  of  harsh  reality.  Here  in  Naples,  under  the 
providence  of  a  kindly  English  society,  the  wretched  breed 
of  horses,  whose  backs  were  full  of  sores,  whose  ribs  were 
numerable,  have  been  replaced  by  a  sleek  stock,  themselves 
perhaps  soon  to  be  replaced  by  the  unsentient  motor.  But 
what  Motor  Millennium  can  wipe  out  the  ages  of  equine 
agony  ? 

And  despite  the  Christ-child  and  the  Christ  crucified, 
nowhere  does  the  triumph  of  life  run  higher  than  in  this 
sunny  land  of  religious  gloom,  Mantegna's  conversion  of 
the  babe  into  a  young  Csesar  being  a  true  if  unconscious 
symbol  of  what  happened  to  the  infant.  Flourishing  the 
forged  Donation  of  Constantine  to  prove  its  claim  to  the 
things  that  were  Caesar's,  it  grew  up  into  that  "  Terrible 
Pontiff "  whose  bronze  effigy  by  Michelangelo  was  so  aptly 
cast  into  a  cannon,  and  whose  Christian  countenance  you 
may  see  in  the  Doria  Gallery  at  Rome  ;  or  into  that 
Borgian  monster  who  was  to  bombard  a  fortress  on  Christ- 
mas Day,  and  who,  crying  joyfully,  "  We  are  Pope  and 
Vicar  of  Christ,"  hastened  to  don  the  habit  of  white 
taffeta,  the  embroidered  crimson  stola,  the  shoes  of  ermine 
and  crimson  velvet.  God  might  choose  to  be  born  in  the 
poorest  and  worst  dressed  circles  of  the  most  unpopular 
People,  but  the  lesson  was  lost.  His  worshippers  insisted 
on  thrusting  Magnificence  back  upon  Him.  Or  perhaps 
it  was  their  own  Magnificence  that  they  were  protecting 
against  His  insidious  teaching.  Consider  their  cathe- 
drals, built  less  in  humility  than  in  urban  emulation  — 
the  Duomo  of  Florence  to  be  worthy  of  the  greatness,  not 
of  God,  but  of  the  Florentines  ;  S.  Petronio  to  eclipse  it 
to  the  greater  glory  of  Bologna  ;  Milan  Cathedral  to  sur- 
pass all  the  churches  in  Christendom,  as  Giangaleazzo's 
palace  surpassed  all  its  princely   dwellings.      In  whose 


44  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

honour  did  the  Pisans  encircle  their  cathedral  with  a  silver 
girdle,  or  the  Venetians  offer  ten  thousand  ducats  for  the 
seamless  coat  ?  Poor  Babe,  vainly  didst  thou  preach  to 
Italy's  great  families,  when  in  humble  adoration  of  thee 
they  had  themselves  painted  in  thy  blessed  society,  the 
Medici  even  posing  to  Botticelli  as  the  three  Magi,  and 
thrusting  their  Magnificence  into  thy  very  manger. 

And  in  our  own  northern  land  the  ox,  companion  of  the 
manger,  for  whose  fattening  at  Christmastide  St.  Francis 
said  he  would  beg  for  an  imperial  edict,  is  fattened  indeed, 
but  merely  for  the  Christmas  market,  stands  with  the 
same  pathetic  eye  outside  the  butcher's  shop,  labelled 
"  Choose  3^our  Christmas  joint,"  and  the  clown  and  panta- 
loon come  tumbling  on  to  crown  the  sacred  birthday. 

Alas  !  history  knows  no  miracles  of  transformation. 
Evolution,  not  revolution,  is  the  law  of  human  life.  In 
Santa  Claus's  stocking  what  you  shall  truly  find  is  traces 
of  earlier  feasts.  The  Christian  festival  took  over,  if  it 
transformed  ,to  higher  import,  the  Saturnalia  of  earlier 
religions  and  natural  celebrations  of  the  winter  solstice. 
Holly  does  not  grow  in  Palestine  ;  the  snowy  landscapes 
of  our  Christmas  cards  are  scarcely  known  of  Nazareth  or 
Bethlehem  ;  mince-pie  was  not  on  the  menu  of  the  Magian 
kings ;  and  the  Christmas  tree  has  its  roots  in  Teutonic 
soil.  But  even  as  the  painters  of  each  race  conceived 
Christ  in  their  own  image,  so  does  each  nation  unthink- 
ingly figure  his  activities  in  its  own  climatic  setting.  And 
perhaps  in  thus  universalising  the  IMaster  the  peoples 
obeyed  a  true  instinct,  for  no  race  is  able  to  receive  lessons 
from  "foreigners."  The  message,  as  well  as  the  man, 
must  be  translated  into  native  terms  —  a  psychological 
fact  which  missionaries  should  understand. 

Nor  is  it  in  the  Palestine  of  to-day  that  the  true 
environment  of  the  Gospels  can  best  be  recovered,  for, 
though  one  may  still  meet  the  shepherd  leading  his  flock, 
the  merchant  dangling  sideways  from  his  ass,  or  Rebeccah 


FANTASIA  NAPOLITANA  45 

carrying  her  pitcher  on  her  shoulder,  that  is  not  the 
Palestine  of  the  Apostolic  period,  but  the  Palestine  of 
the  patriarchs,  reproduced  by  decay  and  desolation.  The 
Palestine  through  which  the  Galilaean  peasant  wandered 
was  a  developed  kingdom  of  thriving  cities  and  opulent 
citizens,  of  Roman  roads  and  Roman  pomp.  Upon  those 
bleak  hill-sides,  where  to-day  only  the  terraces  survive 
—  the  funereal  monuments  of  fertility — the  tangled 
branchery  of  olive  groves  lent  magic  to  the  air.  That 
sea  of  Galilee,  down  which  I  have  sailed  in  one  of  the 
only  two  smacks,  was  alive  with  a  fleet  of  fishing  vessels. 
Yes,  in  the  palimpsest  of  Palestine  'tis  an  earlier  writing 
than  the  Christian  that  has  been  revealed  by  the  fading 
of  the  later  inscriptions  of  her  civilisation.  And  even 
where,  in  some  mountain  village,  the  rainbow-hued  crowd 
may  still  preserve  for  us  the  chronology  of  Christ,  a 
bazaar  of  mother-o'-pearl  mementoes  will  jerk  us  rudely 
back  into  our  own  era.  But  —  saddest  of  all  !  —  the  hands 
of  Philistine  piety  have  raised  churches  over  all  the 
spots  of  sacred  story.  Even  Jacob's  well  is  roofed  over 
with  ecclesiastic  plaster  ;  incongruous  images  of  camels 
getting  through  church  porches  to  drink  confuse  the 
historic  imagination.  Churches  are  after  all  a  way  of 
shutting  out  the  heavens,  and  the  great  open-air  story  of 
the  Gospels  seems  rather  to  suffer  asphyxiation,  overlaid 
by  these  countless  chapels  and  convents.  Is  it,  perhaps, 
allegorical  of  the  perversion  of  the  Christ-teaching  ? 

The  humanitarian  turn  given  to  Yuletide  by  the  genius 
of  Dickens  was  at  bottom  a  return  from  the  caricature 
to  the  true  concept.  Dickens  converted  Christmas  to 
Christianity.  But  over  large  stretches  of  the  planet  and 
of  history  it  is  Christianity  that  has  been  converted  to 
Paganism,  as  the  condition  of  its  existence.  Russia 
was  baptized  a  thousand  years  ago,  but  she  seems  to 
have  a  duck's  back  for  holy  water.  And  even  in  the 
rest  of  Europe  upon  what  parlous  terms  the  Church  still 


46  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

holds  its  tenure  of  nominal  power  !  What  parson  dares 
speak  out  in  a  crisis,  what  bishop  dares  flourish  the  logia 
of  Christ  in  the  face  of  a  heathen  world?  The  old  gods 
still  govern  —  if  they  do  not  rule.  Thor  and  Odin,  Mars 
and  Venus  —  who  knows  that  they  do  not  dream  of  a 
return  to  their  ancient  thrones,  if,  indeed,  they  are  aware 
of  their  exile.  Their  shrines  still  await  them  in  the 
forests  and  glades  ;  every  rock  still  holds  an  altar.  And 
do  they  demand  their  human  temjiles,  lo  !  the  Pantheon 
stands  stable  in  Rome,  the  Temple  of  Minerva  in  Assisi, 
Paestum  holds  the  Temples  of  Ceres  and  Minerva,  and 
on  the  hill  of  Athens  the  Parthenon  shines  in  immortal 
marble.  Their  statues  are  still  in  adoration,  and  how 
should  a  poor  outmoded  deity  understand  that  we 
worship  him  as  art,  not  as  divinity  ?  It  does  but  add 
to  his  confusion  that  now  and  anon  prayers  ascend  to 
him  as  of  yore,  for  can  a  poor  Olympian,  whose  toe  has 
been  faith-bitten,  comprehend  that  he  has  been  catalogued 
as  pope  or  saint  ?  Perchance  some  drowsy  Druid  god, 
as  he  perceives  our  scrupulous  ritual  of  holly  and  fir- 
branch,  imagines  his  worship  unchanged,  and  glads  to 
see  the  vestal  led  under  tlie  mistletoe  by  his  officiating 
priest.  Perchance  in  the  blaze  of  snapdragon  some  pur- 
blind deity  beholds  his  old  fire-offerings,  and  the  savour 
of  turkey  mounts  as  incense  to  his  Norse  nostrils.  Shall 
we  rudely  arouse  him  from  his  dream  of  dominion,  shall 
we  tell  him  that  he  and  his  gross  ideas  were  banished 
two  millenniums  ago,  and  that  the  world  is  now  under 
the  sway  of  gentleness  and  love  ?  Nay,  let  him  dream 
his  happy  dream  ;  let  sleeping  gods  lie.  For  Avho  knows 
how  vigorously  his  old  lustfulness  and  blood-thirst  might 
revive  ;  who  knows  what  new  victims  he  might  claim 
at  his  pyres,  were  he  clearly  to  behold  his  power  still 
unusurped,  his  empire    still  the  kingdom  of  the  world  ? 


THE   CARPENTER'S   WIFE:    A   CAPRICCIO 

"Habent  sua  fata  —  feminse." 

Although  the  Pilgrims'  Way  is  a  sliady  arcade,  yet  the 
ascent  from  Vicenza  was  steep  enough  to  be  something  of 
a  penance  that  sultry  spring  evening,  and  I  was  weary 
of  the  unending  pillars  and  the  modern  yet  already  fading 
New  Testament  frescoes  between  them.  But  I  was  in- 
terested to  see  which  parish  or  family  had  paid  for  each 
successive  section,  and  what  new  name  for  the  Madonna 
would  be  left  to  inscribe  upon  it.  For  even  the  Litany  of 
Loreto  seemed  exhausted,  and  still  the  epithets  poured 
out —  '•'■Lumen  Confessorum^''''  '■'' Consolatrix  Viduarum,^'' 
'■^  Radix  Jesse.,''''  '''■  Stella  Matutina.,''''  '•'•  Fons  Ladirymarum^'' 
"  ChjiJeus  Oppressorum "  —  a  very  torrent  of  love  and 
longing. 

At  last  as  I  neared  the  summit  of  the  Way,  a  fresco 
flashed  upon  me  the  meaning  of  it  all  —  an  "  Apparitio 
B.M.V.  in  Monte  Berico,  1428,"  representing  the  Virgin 
in  all  her  radiant  beauty  appearing  to  an  old  peasant- 
woman.  So  this  it  was  that  had  raised  this  long  religious 
road  to  the  Church  of  Our  Lady  of  the  Mountain !  I  re- 
membered the  inscription  in  S.  Rocco,  telling  how  30,000 
men  had  pilgrimed  here  in  1875  —  spectaculum  mirum 
visu. 

But  where  was  the  church  that  had  been  built  over  the 
spot  of  the  Madonna's  appearance?  I  looked  up  and 
sighed  wearily.  I  was  only  half-way  up,  I  saw,  for  the 
road  turned  sharply  to  tlie  right,  and  a  new  set  of  names 
began,  and  a  new  set  of  frescoes  —  still  cruder,  for  I  caught 
sight  of  nails  driven  into  the  Cross  through  the  writhing 

47 


48  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

frame  of  the  Christ.  But  even  my  curiosity  in  the 
cornucopia  of  epithets  was  worn  out.  The  corner  had  a 
picturesque  outlook,  and  on  the  hill-side  a  bench  stood 
waiting.  Vicenza  stretched  below  me,  I  could  see  the 
Palladian  palaces  admired  of  Goethe,  the  Greek  theatre, 
the  Colonnades,  the  Palace  of  Reason  with  its  long  turtle- 
back  roof ;  and,  beyond  the  spires  and  campaniles,  the 
gleam  of  the  Venetian  Alps.  A  church-bell  from  below 
sounded  for  "Ave  Maria."  I  sat  down  upon  the  bench 
and  abandoned  myself  to  reverie.  Why  should  not  the 
i\Ia(U)nna  appear  to  me  P  I  thought.  Why  this  preference 
for  the  illiterate  ?  And  then  I  remembered  that  this  very 
Pilgrims'  Way  had  served  as  a  battle-ground  for  the 
Austrians  and  the  poor  Italians  of  '48.  How  these  Chris- 
tians love  one  another  !  I  mused.  And  so  my  mind's  eye 
flitted  from  point  to  point,  seeing  again  things  seen  or 
read  —  in  that  inconsequent  phantasmagoria  of  reverie  — 
to  the  pleasant  droning  of  the  vesper  bell.  Presently, 
telling  myself  it  was  getting  late,  I  arose  and  continued 
my  ascent  to  the  Church  of  Our  Lady  of  the  Mountain. 
***** 
But  I  looked  in  vain,  as  I  came  up  the  hill,  for  the  in- 
scriptions and  the  frescoes.  The  sun  was  lower  in  the 
west,  but  the  sunshine  had  grown  even  sultrier,  the  sky 
even  bluer,  the  road  even  steej^er  and  rougher,  and  it  was 
leading  me  on  to  a  gay-flowering  plain  lying  in  a  ring  of 
green  hills  amid  the  singing  of  larks  and  the  cooing  of 
turtle-doves.  And  on  this  plain  I  saw  arising,  not  the 
church  of  my  quest,  but  a  far-scattered  village,  whose  small 
square,  primitive  houses  would  have  seemed  ugly  had  their 
roofs  not  been  picturesque  with  storks  and  pigeons  and 
their  walls  embowered  in  their  own  vines  and  fig-trees  and 
absorbed  into  the  pervasive  suggestion  of  threshing-floors 
and  wine-presses  and  rural  felicity.  By  a  central  fountain 
I  could  perceive  a  group  of  barefoot  maidens,  each  waiting 
her   turn   with  her  water-jar.     They   seemed   gaily   but 


THE  CARPENTER'S  WIFE  .      49 

lightly  clad,  in  blue  and  red  robes,  with  bracelets  gleaming 
at  their  wrists  and  strings  of  coins  shining  from  their 
faces. 

Anxious  to  learn  my  whereabouts,  yet  shy  of  intruding 
upon  this  girlish  group,  I  steered  my  footsteps  towards 
one  who,  her  urn  on  her  shoulder,  seemed  making  her  way 
by  a  side-track  towards  a  somewhat  lonely  house  on  the 
outskirts,  overbrooded  by  the  brow  of  a  hill.  She  was 
brown-skinned,  I  saw  as  I  came  near,  very  young,  but 
of  no  great  beauty  save  for  her  girlish  grace  and  the 
large  lambent  eyes  under  the  arched  black  eyebrows. 

"Di  grazia?"  I  began  inquiringly. 

"Aleikhem  shalom,"  tripped  off  her  tongue  in  heedless 
answer.  Then,  as  if  grown  conscious  I  had  said  some- 
thing strange,  she  paused  and  looked  at  me,  and  I  instinc- 
tively became  aware  she  was  a  Hebrew  maiden.  Yet  T 
had  still  the  feeling  that  I  must  get  back  to  Vicenza. 

"How  far  is  thy  servant  from  the  city?"  I  asked  in  my 
best  Hebrew. 

"From  Yerushalaim?"  she  asked  in  surprise.  "But  it 
is  many  parasangs.  Impossible  that  thou  shouldst  arrive 
at  Yerushalaim  before  the  Passover,  even  borne  upon 
eagles'  wings.  Behold  the  sun  —  the  Sabbath-Passover 
is  nigh  upon  us." 

Ere  she  ended  I  had  divined  by  her  mispronunciation 
of  the  gutturals  and  by  the  Aramaic  flavour  of  her  phrases 
that  she  was  a  provincial  and  that  I  was  come  into  the 
land  of  Canaan. 

"What  is  this  place?"  I  inquired,  no  less  astonished 
than  she. 

"This  is  Nazara." 

"Nazara?     Then  am  I  in  Galila?" 

"Assuredly.  Doubtless  thou  comest  from  the  great 
wedding  at  Cana.  But  thou  shouldst  have  returned  by 
way  of  Mount  Tabor  and  the  town  of  Endor.  Didst  thou 
perchance  see  my  mother  at  Cana?" 


50  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

''Nay;  how  should  I  know  thy  mother?"  I  replied 
evasively. 

She  smiled.  "Am  I  not  made  in  her  image?  But 
overlong,  meseems,  have  ye  all  feasted,  for  it  is  two  days 
since  we  expect  ray  mother  and  brothers." 

"Shall  thy  servant  not  carry  thine  urn?"  I  answered 
uneasily. 

"Nay,  I  thank  thee.  It  is  not  a  bowshot  to  my  door. 
And,"  she  added  with  a  gentle  smile,  "my  brothers  do 
not  carry  my  burdens;    why  should  a  stranger?" 

"And  how  many  brothers  hast  thou?"  I  asked. 

"  Some  are  dead  —  peace  be  upon  them.  But  there  are 
four  yet  left  alive  —  nay,"  she  hesitated,  "five.  But  our 
eldest  hath  left  us." 

"Ah,  he  hath  married  a  wife." 

She  flushed.     "Nay,  but  we  speak  not  of  him." 

"There  must  ever  be  one  black  sheep  in  a  flock,"  I 
murmured  consolingly. 

She  brightened  up.  'So  my  brother  Yakob  always 
says." 

"And  Yakob  should  speak  with  authority  on  the  colour 
of  sheep,  and  not  as  the  scribes."  I  laughed  with  forced 
levity. 

Her  brow  wrinkled  thoughtfull3\  "Doubtless  Yeshua 
is  possessed  of  a  demon,"  she  said.  "One  of  our  sisters, 
Deborah,  was  likewise  a  Sabbath-breaker,  but  now  that 
she  is  old,  having  nineteen  years  and  three  strong  sons, 
she  is  grown  more  pious  than  even  our  uncle  Yehoshuah 
the  Pharisee." 

"Lives  she  here?" 

"Ay,  yonder,  near  my  mother's  sister,  the  wife  of 
Halphai." 

She  pointed  towards  a  battlemented  roof,  but  my  eyes 
were  more  concerned  with  her  own  house,  at  which  we 
were  just  arriving.  It  was  a  one-storey  house,  square 
and  ugly  like  the  others,  redeemed  by  its  little   garden 


THE  CARPENTER'S  WIFE  51 

with  its  hedge  of  prickly  pear,  though  even  this  garden 
was  littered  with  new-made  wheels  and  stools  and  an 
olive-wood  table. 

"Halphai  is  gone  up  for  the  Passover,"  she  added. 
She  stopped  abruptly.  The  tinkle  of  mule-bells  was 
borne  to  us  from  a  steep  track  that  came  to  join  our 
slower  pathway. 

"Lo,  my  mother  !  "  she  cried  joyfully  ;  and  placing  her 
urn  upon  the  ground,  she  hastened  down  the  narrow 
track.  I  moved  delicately,  yet  not  without  curiosity,  to 
the  flank  of  the  hedge,  and  presently  a  little  caravan 
appeared,  ambling  gently,  with  the  girl  walking  and 
chattering  happily  by  the  side  of  her  mother,  who  rode 
upon  an  ass.  I  noticed  that  the  woman,  who  was  small 
and  spare,  listened  but  little  to  her  daughter's  eager  talk, 
and  seemed  deaf  to  the  home-coming  laughter  of  her  four 
curly-headed  sons,  who  rode  their  mules  sideways,  with 
their  legs  dangling  down  like  the  fringes  of  their  gar- 
ments. Her  shoulders  were  sunk  in  bitter  brooding,  and 
when  a  sudden  stumbling  of  her  ass  made  her  raise  her 
head  mechanically  to  pull  him  up,  I  saw  the  shimmer  of 
tears  in  her  large  olive-tinted  eyes.  Certainly  I  should 
not  have  called  her  made  in  the  image  of  her  daughter,  I 
thought  at  that  moment,  for  the  face  was  sorely  lined, 
and  under  the  cheap  black  head-shawl  I  saw  the  greying 
hair  that  was  still  raven  on  her  arched  eyebrows.  But 
doubtless  the  burden  of  much  child-bearing  had  worn  her 
out,  after  the  sad  fashion  of  Eastern  women. 

These  reflections  were,  however,  dissipated  as  soon  as 
born,  for  a  little  cry  of  dismay  from  the  girl  brought  to 
my  perception  that  it  was  the  forgotten  water-jar  that  had 
caused  the  ass's  stumble,  and  that  the  urn  now  lay  over- 
turned, if  not  shattered,  amid  a  fast- vanishing  pool. 

The  little  mishap  made  her  brothers  smile.  "  Cour- 
age !  "  cried  the  eldest.  "  Yeshua  will  fill  it  with  wine 
instead."     At  this  all  the  four  rustics  broke  into  a  roar  of 


52  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

merriment.  The  youngest,  a  mere  beardless  youth,  added 
in  his  vulgar  Aramaic,  "  What  one  ass  hath  destroyed 
another  ^vill  make  good." 

The  little  woman  turned  on  him  passionately.  "Hold 
thy  peace,  Yehudah.  Who  knows  but  that  he  did  change 
the  water  into  wine  ?  " 

"Let  him  come  and  do  it  here,"  retorted  the  eldest. 
"Thou  hast  not  forgotten  what  befell  when  he  essayed 
his  marvels  in  Nazara.  No  mighty  works  could  he  do 
here,  albeit  Shimeon  and  Yose,  inclining  their  ears  to 
Zebedee's  foolish  wife,  were  ready  to  sit  on  his  right  and 
left  hand  in  the  Kingdom." 

The  two  young  men  who  had  not  yet  spoken  looked 
somewhat  foolish. 

"  He  laid  his  hand  upon  sick  folk  and  healed  them," 
one  said  in  apology. 

"  How  many  ? "  queried  young  Yehudah  scornfully. 
"  And  how  many  are  alive  to-day  ?  Nay,  Shimeon,  if  he 
be  Messhiach  let  him  heal  us  of  these  Roman  tyrants  — 
not  go  about  with  their  tax-farmers !  " 

"  Peace,  Yehudah !  "  The  little  mother  looked  round 
nervously,  and  a  fresh  terror  came  into  those  tragic  eyes. 
There  was  something  to  me  deeply  moving  in  the  sight  of 
that  shrinking  little  peasant-woman  surrounded  by  these 
strong,  tall  rustics  whom  she  had  borne  and  suckled. 

"  Let  Yeshua  hold  his  peace  !  "  answered  the  lad  angrily, 
"and  not  prate  about  rendering  unto  Csesar  the  things 
that  are  Cresar's.  But,  God  be  thanked,  a  greater 
Yeshua  hath  arisen  —  Ben  Abbas  —  a  true  patriot,  who 
one  day " 

"  Aha  !  Behold  my  flock  at  last !  "  Startled  by  this 
sudden  new  angry  voice,  I  glanced  over  the  hedge,  and 
saw  standing  on  the  doorstep  cut  in  the  rock,  with  a  ham- 
mer in  his  horny  hand,  a  big  red-bearded  peasant  with 
bushy  eyebrows.  "  These  two  days,  Miriam,  have  I 
awaited  thee." 


THE  CARPENTER'S  WIFE  63 

The  little  woman  slid  meekly  off  her  ass.  "  But,  Yus- 
sef,"  she  said  mildly,  "  thou  saidst  thou  wouldst  go  up  for 
the  Paschal  sacrifice  !  " 

"  And  how  could  I  go  up  to  the  Holy  City  with  all  this 
work  to  finish,  and  not  one  of  my  four  sons  to  carry  my 
work  to  Sepphoris  before  the  Sabbath !  "  He  glared  at 
them  as  they  began  to  lead  their  beasts  behind  the  garden. 
"  Halphai  was  sorely  vexed  that  I  did  not  company  him 
and  join  in  his  lamb-group.  And  the  house  is  not  even 
ready  for  Passover  at  home ;  I  shall  be  liable  to  the  pen- 
alty of  stripes." 

"  I  baked  the  mazzoth  ere  I  departed,"  his  wife  pro- 
tested, "and  Sarah  hath  purged  the  house  of  leaven." 
She  patted  her  daughter's  head. 

"  Sarah  ?  "  he  growled,  reminded  of  a  fresh  grievance. 
"  Sarah  should  have  had  a  husband  of  her  own.  But  with 
these  idle  sons  of  mine,  feasting  and  merrymaking  while  I 
saw  and  plane,  I  cannot  even  save  fifty  zuzim  for  her 
dowry." 

Sarah  blushed  and  hastened  to  pick  up  her  urn  and 
carry  it  back  to  the  fountain. 

"Nay,  but  we  have  tarried  at  Kephar  Nahum,"  said 
Yakob  defensively,  as  he  disappeared. 

The  carpenter  turned  on  his  wife,  his  eyes  blazing 
almost  like  his  beard.  His  hammer  struck  the  table  in 
the  garden,  denting  it.  "'Twas  to  see  thy  loveling  thou 
leftest  home !  " 

The  little  mother  went  red  and  white  by  turns.  "  As 
my  soul  liveth,  Yussef,  I  knew  not  he  would  be  at  the 
wedding." 

"  He  was  at  the  wedding  ?  "  he  asked,  softened  by  his 
surprise. 

"  Ay,  he  and  his  disciples." 

"  Disciples  !  "  The  carpenter  sniffed  wrathfully.  "  A 
pack  of  fishers  and  women,  and  that  yellow-veiled  Miriam 
from  Maerdala." 


54  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

"  The  Magdala  woman  was  not  there  !  "  she  murmured, 
with  lowered  eyes. 

"She  knew  thy  kinsman  would  not  suffer  her  pollution. 
Ah,  Miriam,  what  a  son  thou  hast  brought  into  the 
world  !  " 

Her  eyes  filled  with  tears.  "  Thou  must  not  pay  such 
heed  to  the  Sanhedrim  messengers.  In  their  circuit  to 
announce  the  time  of  the  New  Moon  they  gather  up  all 
the  evil  rumours  of  Galila.  This  Magdala  woman  is  re- 
pentant ;  her  seven  devils  are  cast  out." 

"  Miriam  defends  Miriam,"  he  said  sarcastically.  "  But 
thou  canst  not  say  I  trained  him  not  up  in  the  way  he 
should  go.  Learning  could  we  not  afford  to  give  him,  but 
did  not  thine  own  brotlier,  Jehoshuah  ben  Perachyah, 
teach  him  Torali,  and  did  I  not  teach  him  his  trade? 
His  ploughs  and  yokes  were  the  best  in  all  Galila." 

"  And  now  his  followers  say  his  homilies  are  the  best," 
urged  the  poor  mother. 

"  Homilies  ?  "  he  roared.  "  Blasphemies  !  But  were 
his  Midraschim  Holy  Writ  itself,  I  agree  with  Ben  Sameos 
(his  memory  for  a  blessing  !)  greater  is  the  merit  of 
industry  than  of  idle  piety." 

"  But  why  should  he  work  ? "  cried  Yakob,  who  with 
Yehudah  now  reappeared  from  the  stable.  "  Would  that 
the  wife  of  Herod's  steward  followed  me!"" 

"Or  even  that  Susannah  ministered  to  us  with  her  sub- 
stance !  "  added  Yehudah.  "  Then  I  too  would  teach, 
take  no  thought  for  the  morrow  !  "  And  he  laughed 
derisively. 

"  He  never  took  thought  for  anything  save  himself," 
said  Yussef,  shaking  his  head.  "  Dost  thou  not  remember, 
Miriam,  those  three  dreadful  days  when  he  was  lost,  as 
we  were  returning  from  his  Bar-Mitzvah  in  Yerushalaim  ! 
God  of  Abraham,  shall  I  ever  forget  thy  heart-sickness  ! 
And  what  was  it  he  answered  when  we  at  length  found 
him  in  the  Temple  with  the  doctors  ?     He  was  about  his 


THE  CARPENTER'S   WIFE  55 

father's  business  !  He  was  assuredly  not  about  my  busi- 
ness." 

"  The  Sabbath  and  Passover  are  drawing  nigh,"  she 
murmured,  and  slipped  past  her  sons  into  the  house. 

"  And  what  did  he  answer  thee  at  Kephar  Nahum  ?  " 
her  husband  called  after  her.  "  '  Who  is  my  mother  ?  ' 
The  godless  scoffer  !  The  Jeroboam  ben  Nebat  !  I  thank 
the  Lord  /  did  not  try  to  bring  him  back  home.  He 
might  have  asked,  '  Who  is  my  father  ?  '  " 

There  was  no  reply,  but  I  heard  the  nervous  bustling  of 
a  broom.     The  carpenter  turned  to  Yakob. 

"  And  what  said  he  at  Cana  ?  " 

"  He  demanded  wine,  he  and  his  disciples  !  " 

"Methought  he  was  an  Ebionite  or  an  Essene  !  " 

"  Nay,  as  thou  saidst,  Yeshua  was  ever  a  law  unto  him- 
self.    But  there  was  no  wine." 

"  No  wine  ?  "  cried  Yussef .  "  So  great  a  wedding  com- 
pany and  no  wine  ?  Methought  the  Chosan  was  rich 
enough  to  plant  wine-booths  all  the  way  from  Cana  to 
Nazara,  like  the  Parnass  of  Sepphoris,  and  had  as  many 
gold  and  silver  vessels  as  the  priests  in  the  Temple." 

"  True,  my  father,  but  Yeshua  had  brought  with  him 
that  vile  tax-farmer  Levi,  who  grinds  the  faces  both  of 
rich  and  poor,  and,  seeing  the  spying  publican,  the  bride- 
groom straightway  bade  the  servants  hide  the  precious 
flagons  and  goblets,  lest  more  taxes  be  squeezed  out  for 
the  Romans." 

Yussef  grinned  knowingly.  "  And  so  poor  Yeshua 
must  go  athirst." 

"Nay,  but  hear.  When  he  clamoured  for  wine  the 
servants  wist  not  what  to  do,  and  my  mother  said  gently 
to  him,  'They  have  no  wine.'  But  Yeshua  turned  upon 
her  like  a  lion  of  Mount  Yehudah  upon  a  lamb,  and  he 
roared,  '  Woman,  what  have  I  to  do  with  thee  ?  My  hour 
is  not  yet  come  to  be  a  Nazarite.'  " 

The  carpenter  chuckled.     "  Now  she  will  know  to  stay 


66  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

at  home.  '  Woman,  what  have  I  to  do  with  thee  ?  '  "  he 
repeated  with  unction. 

"  Howbeit,  my  mother  feared  that  liis  demon  again  pos- 
sessed liim,  and  she  besought  the  servants  to  do  whatso- 
ever he  said  unto  them.  But  they  still  held  back.  Then 
Yesliua,  understanding  what  it  was  they  feared,  said, 
'Bring  the  water-pots.'  So  they  went  out  and  brought 
the  earthen  pots  wherewith  we  had  washed  our  hands  for 
the  meal  —  albeit  Yeshua  would  not  wash  his  —  and  lo  ! 
they  were  full  of  wine." 

The  carpenter  repeated  his  knowing  grin.  "  And  Levi 
the  publican  —  what  said  he  ?  " 

"  He  was  the  first  to  cry  '  A  miracle  !  '  "  laughed  Yakob, 
"and  Shimeon-bar-Yonah  held  up  his  hands  and  cried, 
'  Master  of  the  Universe  !     Now  is  Thy  glory  manifest !  '  " 

Yussef  joined  in  his  son's  laugh.  "Is  not  Shimeon  the 
lake  fisherman  ?  " 

"Yea,  my  father;  him  whom  Yeshua  calls  the  Rock." 

"  The  Rock,  in  sooth !  "  broke  in  fiery  young  Yehudah. 
"Say  rather,  the  Shifting  Sand.  It  was  from  Shimeon  I 
learned  to  be  a  Zealot,  and  now  this  recreant  Maccabtean 
is  bosom  friend  of  Roman  tax-gatherers  and  babbles  of  the 
keys  of  Heaven." 

"  Babble  not  thyself,  little  one,"  the  father  rebuked  him. 
He  turned  to  Yakob.  "  And  what  said  Yeshua  after  the 
wine  ?  " 

"  When  he  belield  his  disciples  had  drunk  new  faith  in 
him,  he  too  was  flown,  and  prophesied  darkly  that  he  would 
appear  on  the  right  hand  of  power,  with  clouds  of  glory 
and  twelve  legions  of  angels,  whereat  my  mother  feared 
that  his  madness  was  come  upon  him  as  of  yore,  and  she 
made  us  follow  in  his  train  as  far  as  his  lodging  in  Kephar 
Nahum.  And  we  spake  privily  to  Yudas  that  he  should 
watch  over  him  till  his  unclean  spirit  was  exorcised." 

"  Yudas !  "  cried  Yussef.  "  What  doth  an  honest  Is- 
raelite like  Yudas  in  such  company  ?     But  did  I  not  fore- 


THE   CARPENTER'S  WIFE  57 

tell  what  would  come  of  all  these  baptizings  of  Rabbi 
Jochanan,  all  these  new  foolish  sects  with  their  white 
garments  and  paddles  and  ablutions  ?  Canaan  is  full  of 
wandering  madmen.  The  Torah  I  had  from  my  father, 
Eli  —  peace  be  upon  him !  —  is  holy  enough  for  me,  and 
may  God  forgive  me  that  I  have  not  gone  up  to  kill  the 
Paschal  lamb." 

Yakob  lowered  his  voice.  "  Thou  wouldst  have  met  the 
madman." 

"  What !     Yeshua  is  gone  to  Yerushalaim  ?  " 

"  Sh !  My  mother  knoweth  naught.  We  spake  him 
secretly  as  though  converted,  saying,  '  Lo  !  we  have  seen 
this  day  how  thou  workest  miracles.  But  if  thou  do  these 
things,  show  thyself  to  the  world.  Depart  hence  and  go 
into  Yudsea,  that  men  may  see  the  works  that  thou  doest. 
For  there  is  no  man  that  doeth  anything  in  secret,  and  he 
himself  seeketh  to  be  known  openly.'  So  he  is  gone  up  to 
Yerushalaim  !  " 

The  malicious  glee  on  Yakob's  face  was  reflected  in  his 
father's.  "  Now  shall  the  mocker  be  mocked  !  Even  thy 
learned  uncle,  Ben  Perachyah,  they  scoff  at  for  his  accent, 
nor  will  they  let  him  read  the  prayers.  How  much  less, 
then,  will  they  listen  to  Yeshua !  " 

"And  the  Pharisees  hate  him,"  said  Yakob,  "because  he 
hath  called  them  vipers,  and  the  Shammaites  for  profaning 
the  Sabbath ;  even  the  Essenes  for  not  washing  his  hands 
before  meals." 

"  And  all  the  Zealots  hold  him  a  traitor  !  "  cried  Ye- 
hudah  with  flashing  eyes. 

"  Nor  will  the  Sadducees  or  the  Bcethusians  listen  to  a 
carpenter's  son,"  added  Yakob,  laughingly. 

"  Shame  on  thee,  Yakob,  for  fouling  thine  own  well !  " 
And  Sarah,  returning  with  her  pitcher  on  her  shoulder, 
went  angrily  within. 

Yakob  grew  red.  "  And  dost  thou  think  the  nobles  of 
Yerushalaim  who  eat  off  gold  and  silver  will  follow  him 


58  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

like  fishers  ?  "  he  called  after  her.  "  Say  they  not  already, 
'  Can  anything  good  come  out  of  Nazara  ?  '  " 

''  Yeshua  is  gone  to  Yerushalaira  ?  "  The  little  mother 
had  dashed  to  the  door,  her  eyes  wide  with  terror.  The 
urn  she  had  just  taken  from  her  daughter  fell  from  her 
trembling  hand  and  shattered  itself  on  the  rocky  doorstep, 
splashing  husband  and  son. 

"Woman!"  cried  the  caipenter  angrily,  "have  more 
care  of  my  substance !  " 

"  Yeshua  is  gone  to  YerushalaimI  "  she  repeated  fren- 
ziedly. 

"  Ay,  like  a  good  son  of  Israel.  He  hath  gone  up  for 
the  Paschal  sacrifice.  Mayhap,"  he  added  with  his 
chuckle,  "  he  will  do  wonders  with  the  blood  of  the  lamb. 
Come,  Miriam,  let  us  change  our  garments  and  anoint 
ourselves  for  the  festival." 

He  pushed  the  woman  gently  within  the  room,  but  she 
stood  there  as  one  turned  into  a  pillar  of  salt,  and  with 
an  Eastern  shrug  he  went  in. 

Presently  Sarah  came  and  wiped  the  steps  with  a  clout 
and  gathered  up  the  shards,  and  then,  with  a  new  pitcher 
on  her  shoulder,  she  bent  her  steps  towards  the  fountain. 

I  skirted  round  to  meet  her  on  her  return,  not  a  little 
to  her  amazement;  but  this  time  she  surrendered  her 
burden  to  my  entreaty,  though  the  ungainly  manner  in 
which  I  poised  the  pitcher  lightened  her  clouded  brow 
with  inner  laughter. 

"  This  wandering  brother  of  thine,"  I  ventured  to  ask 
at  length,  "  dost  thou  think  harm  will  befall  him  in  Yeru- 
shalaim?  " 

Her  brow  puckered  thoughtfully.  "  Perchance  these 
strangers  will  believe  on  him,  not  knowing  as  we  do  that 
he  hath  a  demon.  Yeshua  was  wroth  with  us  when  he 
came,  crying  out  that  a  man's  foes  are  those  of  his  own 
household,  and  a  prophet  is  nowhere  without  honour  save 
in  his  own  country.     But  how  should  Yeshua  be  able  to 


THE  CARPENTER'S  WIFE  59 

work  miracles  more  than  Yakob  or  Yehudah  ?  When  he 
stood  up  in  our  synagogue  on  the  Shabbos  to  read  and 
expound  the  prophet  Yeshaiah,  his  lips  were  touched  with 
the  same  burning  coal  —  almost  he  persuaded  me  to  be  a 
heretic — but  inasmuch  as  he  could  do  no  miracles,  all  they 
in  the  synagogue  were  filled  with  wrath,  and  rose  up  and 
thrust  him  out  of  the  city."  She  pointed  to  the  brow  of  the 
hill  hanging  over  us.  "  Up  there  they  led  him,  that  they 
might  cast  him  down  headlong.  But  out  of  compassion 
for  my  mother,  who  had  followed  with  the  crowd,  they 
let  him  go,  and  he  returned  to  Kephar  Nahum  and  con- 
tinued to  make  yokes  and  wheels  for  his  livelihood." 

"  And  he  still  works  there?  " 

"Nay,  he  neglected  his  craft  to  preach  in  the  great 
synagogue  built  by  the  centurion — indeed,  it  is  a  hot  place 
for  work  down  there  by  the  lake,  neither  is  it  so  healthy 
as  here  in  Nazara.  Also  he  had  free  lodging  with  the 
family  of  Shimeon-bar-Yonah  whom  they  call  Petros,  while 
Shalome,  the  wife  of  Zebedee,  and  other  women  tended 
him  and  mended  his  garments.  But  his  fever  took  him 
and  he  began  to  wander  about  all  Galila,  teaching  in  the 
synagogues  and  preaching  his  strange  gospel." 

"  What  gospel  ?  " 

"  How  should  a  girl  know  ?  Some  heresy  anent  the 
Kingdom.  And  there  went  out  a  fame  of  him  through 
all  the  region  round  about,  and  some  said  he  healed  all 
manner  of  sickness,  so  that  there  followed  him  great  mul- 
titudes of  people.  But  many  came  to  us  and  said,  'Alas! 
he  is  beside  himself.'  And  the  Messengers  of  the  New 
Moon  told  us  many  strange  tales,  so  that  my  mother  was 
nigh  distraught,  and  when  it  was  bruited  that  he  had  said 
Kephar  Nahum  shall  be  thrust  down  to  hell,  she  journeyed 
thither,  she  and  my  brothers,  to  bring  him  home  and  watch 
over  his  affliction.  But  lo!  they  could  not  lay  hold  of 
him,  for  he  was  surrounded  by  such  a  press  of  people  that 
they  could  not  even  come  nigh  unto  him.     So  she  sent  a 


60  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

message  that  his  mother  and  brothers  desired  to  have 
speecli  of  him.  And  he  answered,  'Who  is  my  mother? 
Who  are  my  brothers  ? '  and  he  stretched  forth  his  hand 
towards  his  disciples  and  said,  '  Beliold  my  mother  and  my 
brothers.'  So  she  returned  home  sorely  stricken,  and  put 
on  mourning  garments,  and  even  the  birth  of  her  grand- 
children gave  her  no  joy.  But  when  came  the  marriage 
of  her  rich  kinsman  in  Cana  my  father  would  have  her  go, 
being  weary  of  her  weeping  and  thinking  to  cheer  her 
heart;  but  lo!  her  last  state  is  worse  than  her  first,  inas- 
much as "     She  broke  off  abruptly  as  we  reached  the 

hedge  of  prickly  pear.  "  But  why  have  I  told  all  this  to 
a  stranger  ?  " 

"  Because  I  have  none  else  with  whom  to  eat  the  Pass- 
over," I  answered  boldly. 

She  turned  and  looked  at  me.  Then,  taking  her  pitcher 
from  rae  with  a  word  of  thanks,  "  I  will  tell  my  father," 
she  answered  gravely. 

I  waited  in  the  little  garden,  watching  a  patriarchal  tor- 
toise. Presently  the  carpenter  reappeared  on  the  doorstep, 
a  new  man  in  festal  garment  and  mien,  his  head  anointed 
with  oil. 

"  Baruch  Habaa  !"  he  cried  cordially.  "Since  I  cannot 
go  up  to  Yerushalaim,  Yerushalaim  comes  up  to  me." 

I  followed  him  into  the  house,  duly  kissing  the  mezuzah 
as  I  went  through  the  door.  The  room  was  small  and 
dark,  with  bare  walls  built  of  little  liver-coloured  blocks 
of  cemented  stone,  and  the  matted  floor  seemed  to  hold  less 
furniture  than  that  which  littered  the  garden.  The  car- 
penter's bench  had  been  covered  with  cushions,  and  I 
could  see  that  the  divan  was  used  for  a  bed.  Very  humble 
was  the  house-gear,  these  earthenware  dishes  and  metal 
drinking-cups  and  brass  candlesticks  on  the  Passover 
table,  and  I  saw  no  ornaments  save  a  few  terra-cotta  vases, 
a  Hebrew  scroll  or  two,  and  a  rudely  painted  coffer.  The 
housewife,  busy  at  the  hearth  with  the  roasted  egg  and 


THE  CARPENTER'S   WIFE  61 

bone  of  the  ritual,  greeted  me  with  wistful  eyes  and  lips 
that  vainly  tried  to  murmur  or  smile  a  welcome,  and  I 
watched  her  deft  mechanic  movements  as  I  sat  lightly 
gossiping  with  the  males  over  the  exegesis  of  the  seventh 
chapter  of  Yeshaiah.  I  told  them  that  the  Septuagint 
translator  had  darkened  the  fourteenth  verse  by  loosely 
rendering  nX2 7!?  as  irap6evo<i^  or  "  virgin,"  instead  of 
"  maiden,"  but  this  did  not  interest  them,  as  they  knew 
no  Greek.  The  room  took  a  more  cheerful  air  when  the 
mother  lit  the  Sabbath  candles  with  a  blessing  almost  as 
inaudible  as  her  welcome  to  me,  and  soon  my  host  began 
the  Haggadah  service  by  holding  his  hands  over  the  wine- 
goblet.  But  Yehudah  asked  the  ritual  question,  "  Why 
does  this  night  differ  from  all  other  nights  ?  "  with  a  touch 
of  sarcasm,  and  interrupted  himself  to  cry  passionately : 
"  How  can  we  celebrate  our  deliverance  from  Egypt  when 
the  Roman  Eagle  hangs  at  the  very  door  of  our  Temple?" 
At  this  the  little  mother  turned  yet  paler,  and  every  eye 
glanced  uneasily  towards  the  stranger. 

"  Nay,  I  am  no  friend  of  the  Romans,"  I  said  reassuringly. 

Yehudah  continued  the  formula  sullenly.  It  was  as  I 
had  always  heard  it,  save  for  the  question,  "  Why  is  the 
meat  all  roasted  and  none  sodden  or  boiled  ?  "  But  the 
father  had  scarcely  begun  his  ritual  reply  when  we  heard 
a  loud  knocking  on  the  door,  the  latch  was  lifted,  and  in 
another  instant  we  saw  a  burly  man  panting  on  the  thresh- 
old, and  behind  him,  more  vaguely  in  the  dusk,  an  agi- 
tated woman  under  a  head-shawl. 

"  O  Reb  Yussef  !  "  breathed  the  newcomer. 

"  Halphai  !  "  cried  the  carpenter  in  amaze.  "  Art  not  in 
Yerushalaim  ?  " 

The  little  mother  had  sprung  to  her  feet. 

"  They  have  killed  my  Yeshua  !  "  she  shrieked. 

"  Sit  down,  woman  !  "  said  the  carpenter  sternly. 

But  she  gestured  to  the  figure  in  the  rear :  "  Speak,  my 
sister,  speak." 


62  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

"  Nay,  I  will  speak,"  grumbled  her  sister's  husband. 
"  Why  else  did  I  take  horse  from  the  Holy  City  without 
hearing  the  Levites  sing  or  the  trumpets  blow  for  the 
blood-sprinkling?  Thy  Yeshua  came  up  through  the 
Fountain  Gate  riding  on  an  ass,  and  as  one  flown  with 
new  wine." 

"  Yea,  the  wine  of  the  water-pots  !  "  laughed  Yakob. 

"  And  a  very  great  multitude  spread  their  garments  in  the 
way  ;  others  cut  down  branches  from  the  trees  and  strewed 
them  in  the  way.  And  the  multitudes  that  went  before 
and  that  followed  cried,  '  Hosanna  to  the  son  of  David  ! '  " 
He  paused  for  breath,  leaving  this  picture  suspended,  and 
I  saw  a  new  light  leap  into  the  mother's  tragic  eyes,  a 
strange  exaltation  as  of  a  secret  hope  incredulously  con- 
firmed. 

"  In  Yerushalaim  ?  "  she  breathed.  "  They  cry  Hosanna 
in  Yerushalaim  ?  " 

"  Yea,"  said  her  sister.  "  And  Halphai  told  me,  even 
the  little  children  cried, '  Hosanna  to  the  son  of  David ! '  " 

The  carpenter  was  crumbling  a  mazzo  with  nervous 
fingers  ;  an  angry  vein  swelled  on  his  forehead.  "  And 
Pilatus  permitted  this  ?  "  he  cried. 

"  Patience,  Reb  Yussef  !  "  said  Halphai.  "  There  is 
more  to  come.  For,  growing  yet  more  swollen  in  his  pre- 
sumption, Yeshua  went  to  the  Holy  Temple,  and,  enter- 
ing the  Court  of  the  Gentiles,  where  sit  those  who  sell  the 
sheep  and  the  oxen  and  doves,  instead  of  purchasing  a 
sacrifice  for  his  sins,  he  drove  them  all  out  with  a  scourge 
of  small  cords  and  poured  out  the  changers'  money  !  " 

Horror  held  the  household  dumb.  I  saw  Halphai  look 
round  complacently,  as  though  compensated  for  his  hot 
ride  to  Nazara.  "  And  ye  know  what  profit  Hanan  makes 
out  of  his  bazaars,"  he  added  significantl3\ 

The  mother  was  wringing  her  hands.  "  Hanan  will 
never  forgive  him,"  she  cried.  "  They  will  kill  him  as 
they  killed  Jochanan  the  Baptizer." 


THE  CARPENTER'S  WIFE  63 

"  Peace,  woman,"  said  Yussef  impatiently.  "  The 
High  Priest  and  the  Eklers  will  but  drive  him  from 
the   city." 

"  Nay,  nay,"  said  Halphai.  "  They  hold  him  captive. 
And  his  disciples  are  fled.  All  save  Yudas,  who  led  a 
multitude  with  swords  and  staves  to  find  him.  And 
Shimeon-bar-Yonah  too  is  taken,  merely  because  his  speech 
bewrayeth  him  as  a  Galilsean.  How  then  should  I  dare 
stay,  who  have  the  ill-hap  to  be  married  to  his  mother's 
sister  !  " 

The  little  mother  was  moving  towards  the  door.  Her 
husband  stopped  her.     "  Whither  goest  thou  ?  " 

"  To  saddle  the  ass.     I  must  to  Yerushalaim  !  " 

«  Thou  !  " 

"Who  else!  Shall  that  yellow-veiled  woman  of  Mag- 
dala  give  him  comfort  ?  " 

"  And  will  he  take  comfort  from  thee  ?  Doth  he  not 
teach  his  followers  to  hate  their  father  and  their  mother  ? 
And  doth  he  not  scoff  at  the  womb  that  bare  him  ?  " 

"  Not  he,  but  his  demon,"  she  answered  obstinately,  and 
pressed  forward  again. 

His  brow  grew  black.     "  But  it  is  the  Sabbath  ! " 

"  It  is  my  first-born." 

"  Thou  speakest  more  foolishly  than  Job's  wife.  Now 
we  see  whence  Yeshua  sucked  his  blasphemies." 

"  It  is  my  first-born  !  "  she  repeated  more  frenziedly. 

"  Thy  first-born  !  But  did  he  keep  to-day  the  Fast  of 
the  First-born  ?  " 

"  Let  her  go,  Yussef,"  pleaded  Halphai.  "  As  Rabbi 
Hillel  taught  (his  memory  for  a  blessing),  the  Sabbath 
was  handed  to  man,  not  man  to  the  Sabbath  !  " 

"  And  the  wife  to  the  husband,"  retorted  Yussef,  "  not 
the  husband  to  the  wife.  I  forbid  thee,  Miriam,  to  disturb 
the  Passover  peace.     Go  —  and  I  put  thee  away  publicly!  " 

She  blenched  and  sank  back  on  the  divan.  "  Peace  ?  " 
she  moaned.     "  Thou  callest  this  peace  !  " 


64  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

"  Obey  thy  lord,  Miriam  !  /will  go."  And  Halphai's 
wife  stooped  and  kissed  her. 

Miriam  burst  into  loud  sobs.  She  caught  her  sister  to 
her  breast,  and  the  two  women  mingled  their  tears. 

The  carpenter  shrugged  his  shoulders.  "  Blessed  art 
Thou,  O  Lord,  who  hast  not  made  me  a  woman,"  he  said 

drily. 

*  *  ^  *  in 

The  walls  of  the  little  room  seemed  higher,  the  light 
stronger,  the  prayer  devouter,  the  company  more  numerous. 
Instead  of  the  two  little  Sabbath  candles  and  the  earthen- 
ware dishes,  I  saw  a  barbaric  blaze  of  gold  and  rich  stuffs 
and  jewels,  and  my  eyes  blinked  before  the  flames  of  tall 
candles  shining  in  gold  candlesticks  on  a  magnificent  altar, 
in  the  niche  of  which  stood  a  black  cedar-wood,  idol, 
crowned  and  holding  a  crowned  doll,  and  wrapped  in  a 
marvellous  ornate  vestment  widening  out  like  a  bell. 
Over  my  head  around  the  rough,  liver-coloured  stone 
walls  hung  lamps  and  bronzes  and  candles  held  by  Cupids, 
and  gilded  busts,  and  medallions  and  hearts  and  bronze 
reliefs  and  pictures,  and  even  a  cannon-ball,  and  at  my 
feet  surged  the  white  head-shawls  of  prostrate  worshippers, 
like  a  great  wave  breaking  on  the  crimson  steps  of  the 
altar. 

And  gradually  I  became  aware  that  the  room  had  now 
doors  on  the  right  and  the  left,  and  these  of  bronze  and 
wondrously  wrought  after  the  fashion  of  the  Renaissance, 
through  which  a  stream  of  worshippers  poured,  kissing  the 
bronze  as  they  passed  in  and  out.  And  following  one 
stream  and  vaguely  looking  for  Miriam  and  her  husband 
and  the  Passover  table,  I  was  borne  back  into  the  room, 
through  another  door,  and  now  found  myself  in  a  narrow 
and  still  more  crowded  space  at  the  back  of  the  altar,  where 
the  gorgeous  jewelled  black  idol  with  her  doll  stood  in 
her  niche  in  the  gleam  of  ever-burning  silver  lamps,  and 
I  saw  a  golden  eagle  in  a  yellow  sun  flying  over  her  head. 


THE   CARPENTER'S  WIFE  65 

and  over  the  eagle  two  gilded  angels  holding  a  glittering 
wreath,  and  still  higher,  through  a  hole  in  the  roof,  as 
riding  on  clouds,  a  blue-mantled  Mother  and  Child  among 
a  soaring  escort  of  angels,  while  near  the  floor  I  beheld  a 
large  metal  box  with  a  yawning  slit,  into  which  a  kneel- 
ing, weeping  press  of  people  rained  money. 

"  II  Santo  Camino,  signore  !  "  said  an  ingratiating  voice, 
and  looking  up  I  perceived  at  my  side  a  beadle  with  a 
wand. 

"  The  holy  kitchen  ?  "  I  repeated  in  amaze. 

"  Si^  signore.  Here  is  the  hearth  at  which  the  Ma- 
donna cooked  for  the  Holy  Family." 

He  pointed  to  the  money-box,  and  I  now  indeed  recog- 
nised the  fireplace  whence  Miriam  had  taken  the  roasted 
bone  and  egg.  But  it  had  moved  to  another  side  of  the 
living-room,  unless  I  was  confused  by  the  altar  planted  in 
the  place  of  the  Passover  table. 

"  Then  this  is  the  house  of  Nazara  ?  "  I  said  in  a  whis- 
per, for,  dazed  as  I  was,  I  feared  to  disturb  the  worship- 
pers. 

"  Sicuro  !  "  He  smiled  reassuringly.  "  La  Santa  Casa  ! 
Here  the  Holy  Family  abode  in  the  peace  and  love  of  the 
Holy  Ghost.  And  here  there  is  Plenary  Indulgence  every 
day  in  the  year.  Eceo!  One  of  their  pots  !  "  And  he 
produced  a  terra-cotta  vessel,  not  unlike  one  I  had  seen 
the  little  olive-eyed  woman  wiping,  save  that  it  was  lined 
with  gold  and  adorned  with  bas-reliefs  of  the  Manger  and 
the  Annunciation. 

"  That  must  have  cost  money,"  I  murmured  feebly. 
"  (rm,"  he  assented  complacently.     "  And  behold  the 
Madonna  Neva.,  carved  by  St.  Luke.     Her  attire  is  worth 
1,800,000  lire." 

"  Come  ?  "  I  gasped. 

He  spurned  a  sobbing  peasant-woman  with  his  foot  and 
cleared  a  space  with  his  staff  that  he  might  plant  me  at 
the  centre  of  the  money-box. 


66  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

"  Fassi,''  he  said  pleasantly,  seeing  I  hesitated  to  dis- 
place these  passionate  souls.  "  Regard  the  jewels  and 
precious  stones  of  her  robe,  the  diamonds,  emeralds,  and 
pearls  in  her  crown,  the  collars  of  Oriental  pearl,  the  rings, 
the  crosses  of  topaz  and  diamonds,  the  Bambino's  diamond 
necklace,  the  ring  on  his  finger,  the  medallion  with  the 

great  diamonds  given  by  the  King  of  Saxony "     He 

trolled  off  the  glittering  catalogue,  on  and  on,  in  a  joyous, 
dominant  voice,  to  which  the  sighs  and  groans  of  the  wor- 
shippers made  an  undertone.  Countesses  and  Cardinals, 
Popes  and  jNIarchese  had  vied  in  dressing  the  idol,  and 
decorating  the  kitchen.  "  And  you  must  see  the  Treas- 
ury," he  wound  up.  "  Gifts  from  all  the  royal  houses 
of  Europe  to  Our  Lady  of  Loreto  !  " 

"  Loreto  ?  "  I  repeated  dully. 

He  looked  at  me  sharply,  as  at  a  scoffer. 

"  But  how  did  the  Holy  House  get  to  Loreto  ?  "  I  added 
hastily. 

"It  was  carried  by  angels,"  he  answered  simply. 

"  But  when  ?  " 

"  On  the  night  of  the  tenth  of  December  in  tlie  year 
1294  from  tlie  bearing  of  the  Virgin." 

"  Who  saw  it  carried  ?  " 

"  You  are  an  Englishman,"  he  answered  briefly.  "  You 
shall  see  it  in  English." 

He  made  a  i)ath  through  the  praying  crowd,  and  I  fol- 
lowed him  without,  and  ray  breath  failed  me  as  I  became 
aware  that  the  Holy  House  was  inclosed  in  a  precious 
outer  casing  of  marble,  carved  with  beautiful  reliefs  of 
the  life  and  death  of  the  Virgin,  holding  all  round  its 
four  lofty  walls  niches  with  statues  of  prophets  and  sybils 
and  other  gleaming  altars,  each  with  its  surf  of  worship- 
pers, and  tliat  this  marvellous  screen,  so  rich  in  the  work 
of  the  Masters,  was  itself  engirdled  by  a  vast  high-domed 
church  with  rich-dyed  windows,  gilded  like  a  Venetian 
palace  and  full  of  arches  and  pillars  and  altars  and  chap- 


THE  CARPENTER'S   WIFE  67 

els  and  mosaics  and  statues  and  busts  and  thick-populated 
frescoes,  while  from  the  centre  of  the  choir  windows  a 
haloed  Lady  in  a  blue  mantle  gazed  down  upon  her 
white-hooded  ghostly  worshippers  filling  the  nave.  And 
all  around  her  from  the  interlacing  of  the  arches  and  from 
the  painted  walls  haloes  gleamed  like  a  firmament  of  cres- 
cent moons. 

"  Behold  there  !  "  said  the  beadle,  pointing  with  his 
staff,  and  I  saw  that  round  the  projecting  base  of  the 
marble  walls  ran  two  deep  parallel  furrows.  "  Worn  in 
the  stone  by  the  knees  of  six  centuries  of  pilgrims,"  he 
said  pleasantly.  "  Of  course  there  are  not  many  to-day, 
being  an  ordinary  Sunday,  but  in  the  year  there  are  a 
hundred  thousand,  and  in  the  season  of  the  pilgrimages, 

or  on  the  Feast  of  the  Assumption "     An  expressive 

gesture  wound  up  the  sentence. 

We  passed  along  the  aisles,  just  peeping  into  the 
copious  chapels,  all  pervaded  by  the  ubiquitous  Maria  in 
picture  or  mosaic,  in  statue  or  bas-relief  —  Maria  Immac- 
ulate, Maria  the  Virgin,  Maria  the  Mother  of  God,  Maria 
the  Compassionate,  Maria  the  Mediatress,  Maria  Crowned  ; 
and  the  marriage  of  Maria,  and  her  death,  and  the  visit  to 
Elizabeth,  and  the  Annunciation,  and  her  family  tree,  and 
the  disputes  of  the  Sorbonne  over  the  dogmas  concerning 
her.  And  as  we  walked  the  organ  began  pealing,  and 
priests  and  choristers  chanted. 

"  Uceo  !  "  cried  the  beadle,  as  he  stopped  in  the  left  aisle 
and  pointed  to  a  great  black-framed  slate  between  two 
altars.     "  In  your  own  English  !  " 

I  looked  and  read  the  headline  of  white  letters  : 

"  The  Wondrous  Flitting  of  the  Kirk  of  our  Blest  Ledy 
of  Lavreto." 

Underneath  ran  in  parallel  columns  these  two  sentences  : 

"  By  decree  of  the  Meikle  Werthy  Monsignor  Vincent 
Casal  of  Bolonia  Ruler  of  This  Helly  Place  Vnder  the 
protection  of  the  Mest  Werthy  Cardinal  Moroni." 


68  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

"  I  Robert  Corbington  Priest  of  the  Companie  of  Jesvs 
in  the  Zeir  MDCXXXV  Heve  Trvlie  translated  the  prem- 
isses of  the  Latin  Storie  Hangged  vp  in  the  seyd  Kirk." 

And  underneath  these  parallel  statements  were  the 
words,  "To  the  Praise  and  (llorie  of  the  Mest  Pvre  and 
Immaculate  Virgin." 

Then  began  the  story  proper  : 

"  The  Kirk  of  Lavreto  was  a  caumber  of  the  hovse  of 
the  blest  Virgin  near  Jerusalem  in  the  to wne  of  Nazaret  in 
which  she  was  borne  and  treined  vp  and  greeted  of  the 
angel  and  hairin  also  Conceaved  and  norislit  har  sonne 
Jesvs." 

My  eye  ran  impatiently  over  these  known  details  and 
lighted  at  a  lower  point  of  the  great  dimly-lit  slate. 

"  Pavl  de  Sylva  an  eremyt  of  micle  godliness,  wha 
woned  in  a  cell  near  by  this  Kirk  whair  dail}^  he  went  to 
mattins,  seyd  that  for  ten  zcirs,  one  the  eight  of  Septem- 
ber, twelve  hovrs  before  day,  he  saw  a  light  descend  frera 
heaven  vpon  it,  whilk  he  said  was  by  the  bu  weathair 
shawed  har  selfe  [si'e]  one  the  feest  of  har  birth.  In  proof 
of  all  whilk  twa  verteous  men  of  the  seyd  towne  of  Re- 
canah  many  times  avowed  to  me  Rvler  of  Terreman  and 
Govenor  of  the  forseyd  Kirk  as  foUoweth.  Ane  of  them, 
nemmed  Pavle  Renallvci,  affirmed  that  his  grandsyres 
grandsyre  sawe  when  the  angels  broght  it  over  sea  setting 
it  in  the  forseyd  wood  and  hed  oft  frequented  it  thair,  the 
other  nemmed  Francis  Prior  sicklik  seyd  that  his  Grand- 
syre, being  a  hunder  and  twaintie  zeirs  awd  hed  also 
meikle  havnted  it  in  the  same  place  and  for  a  mere  svr 
testimony  that  it  had  beine  thair  he  reported  that  his 
grandsyres  grandsyre  hed  a  hovse  beside  it  wharin  he 
dwelled  and  that  in  his  dayes  it  was  beared  by  the  angels 
frae  thence  to  the  hill  of  they  tweye  brothers  whar  they 
set  it  as  seyd.  ..." 

"  The  angels  seem  to  have  carried  it  about  more  than 
once,"  I  interrupted. 


THE  CARPENTER'S   WIFE  69 

"  (rta,"  said  the  beadle.  "  At  first  they  placed  it  on  the 
hill  of  Picino,  in  a  grove  of  laurels  which  bowed  before  it 
and  remained  in  adoration.  But  so  many  thieves  and 
assassins  took  cover  under  them  to  plunder  the  pious 
pilgrims  of  their  offerings  that  the  laurels  raised  their 
heads  again,  and  after  a  stay  of  only  eight  months  the 
Holy  House  moved." 

"  And  came  here  ?  " 

"  Not  yet.  It  moved  first  to  a  pleasant  hill  belonging 
to  the  brothers  Artici,  ancestors  of  Leopardi." 

"  Ah,  the  hill  of  they  tweye  brothers,"  I  murmured. 

"  But  the  treasure  heaped  upon  it  dazzled  them.  They 
might  have  fought  over  it  like  Cain  and  Abel.  So  the 
house  moved  on." 

"And  yet  even  Leopardi  chanted  the  Madonna,"  I 
said. 

"  Lo  credo,''''  said  the  beadle,  unastonished.  "  And  there 
is  still  an  inscription  on  the  hill,  but  it  does  not  console 
the  neighbourhood  any  more  than  the  chapel  at  Ravinizza." 

"  The  chapel  at  Ravinizza  ?  " 

"  Did  I  not  say  ?  That  Avas  where  it  stopped  first  — 
near  Dalmatia." 

"  Quite  a  wandering  Jew-house,"  I  murmured. 

"  That  was  in  1291,  when  the  Holy  Land  fell  into  the 
power  of  the  Infidel." 

"  Ah,  that  was  why  it  left  Palestine  !  " 

"  Naturally.  And  you  may  imagine  the  agony  of  the 
Dalmatians  when  they  returned  from  the  Crusades  to  find 
the  Holy  House  no  longer  in  Ravinizza,  Even  to-day  the 
pilgrims  sail  out  in  little  boats  singing,  '  Return  to  us, 
Maria,  with  thy  house  !  '  But  how  could  it  return  to 
Dalmatia,  seeing  that  seventy-five  years  before  it  left 
Palestine  the  blessed  St.  Francis  had  fore-told  its  coming 
here  by  his  word  Picenvm,  which  is  a  region  on  our  side 
of  the  Adriatic,  and  being,  moreover,  interpreted  by  Latin 
scholars  is  a  prophetic  acrostic  ?  " 


70  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

"  It  seems  a  pity  the  house  did  not  come  straight  to 
Loreto,"  I  ventured. 

"  We  are  fortunate  it  did  not  go  straight  back  to  Naza- 
reth after  the  battle  of  Lepanto,"  he  said  simply.  "It 
was  after  Our  Lady's  victory  over  the  Turks  that  this 
marble  screen  was  placed  around  it.  Here  is  the  Treasury." 
And  thrusting  roughly  through  the  press  of  congregants, 
he  opened  a  door  and  ushered  me  into  a  palatial  room 
where  under  the  ceiling-frescoes  of  Pomerancio  of  Pesaro 
I  saw  what  seemed  a  vast  bazaar  of  every  precious  article 
known  to  humanity. 

"The  New  Treasury,"  he  said  apologetically.  "The 
old  treasure  was  seized  by  Napoleon.  It  was  worth 
96,000,000  lire."     He  looked  sad. 

"  And  how  much  is  this  worth  ?  " 

"Only  4,000,000."  And  the  unctuous  catalogue  re- 
commenced. A  Genoese  family  had  given  this  case  of 
jewellery  ;  it  was  worth  100,000  lire.  These  were  the 
copes  and  vestments  of  Pio  Nono  (150,000  lire).  This 
was  the  diadem  of  ]\Iaria,  Queen  of  Spain,  wife  of  Carlo 
IV. — behold  the  amethysts,  the  brilliants,  the  rubies. 
These  Oriental  pearls  were  from  the  Princess  of  Wiirtem- 
berg.  Each  pearl  cost  150,000  lire  and  there  were  forty- 
three  pearls  —  the  signore  could  calculate  for  himself. 
This  diamond  tiara  with  an  Oriental  pearl  in  the  centre 
was  given  by  ]\Iaria  Louisa,  Duchessa  di  Parma.  It  was 
worth  420,000  lire. 

"  ]{estoring  some  of  her  first  husband's  plunder,"  I  inter- 
rupted. 

'■'■Gid.  And  the  Madonna  Neva  was  given  back  too. 
And  this  pearl  and  gold  covering  for  her  is  from  Maria 
Theresa,  Archduchess  of  Austria.  It  is  worth  12,000 
lire.  And  Giuseppe  Napoleon's  wife  gave  us  this  mon- 
strance. And  this  cup  is  from  Prince  Maximilian  of 
Austria,  and  these  regalia " 

The  list  went  on,  and  I  studied  a  coral  model  of  the 


THE  CARPENTER'S  WIFE  71 

Santa  Casa  with  the  mother  and  son  riding  on  the  roof, 
while  from  the  church  came  a  boy's  voice  soaring  heaven- 
ward. 

"  And  do  you  refuse  offerings  from  those  who  are  not 
royal  ?  "  I  broke  in  at  last. 

"  Ah,  no,"  he  said  seriously.  "  See  !  In  that  glass  case 
are  a  thousand  rings  from  a  thousand  pilgrims,  and  this 
standard  is  from  a  pilgrim  of  Budapest,  and  this  little 
wooden  ship  —  the  Maria  —  was  given  by  a  sailor,  and  this 
pearl  showing  the  Madonna  and  her  Son  was  found  inside 
a  fish  by  a  fisherman,  and  these  ornaments  painted  with  the 
juice  of  grass  are  the  work  of  priests,  and  this  beautiful 
bronze  candelabrum  was  given  by  the  Guild  of  Blacksmiths 
of  Bologna.  A  Capuchin  father  from  South  America 
brought  us  these  great  bouquets  of  flowers  made  of  the 
wings  of  Brazilian  birds,  and  a  Roumanian  noble  this 
little  Byzantine  brass  Madonna,  and  Prince  Carraciolo  of 
Naples " 

'■'' Basta !  ^''  I  cried  hurriedly,  for  he  was  back  in  the 
"  Almanach  de  Gotha,"  and,  slipping  a  large  piece  of  silver 
with  a  royal  portrait  on  it  into  his  hand,  I  moved  towards 
the  door. 

His  face  shone.  "  But  you  have  not  seen  the  cups  in  the 
Santa  Casa  from  which  the  Holy  Family  drank.  And 
their  little  bells,  and " 

"I  have  seen  enough,"  I  said. 

"  And  the  cannon-ball,"  he  went  on  in  undiminished 
gratitude.  "  The  cannon-ball  which  shattered  the  pavil- 
ion of  Pope  Julius  II.  when  he  was  besieging  a  city, 
but  which  by  the  grace  of  the  Blessed  Virgin  left  him 
un " 

I  escaped  into  the  crowd  of  snooded  peasant  women 
and  worked  my  way  along  the  aisle  till  I  stood  outside 
the  portal  under  a  gigantic  Madonna  and  Child. 

But  the  beadle  was  beside  me. 

"  Go  and  look  at  the  Fontana  deUa  Santa  Casa."     And 


72  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

he   pointed   in   parting   gratitude    to   the   centre    of   the 
piazza.     ^'Bellismna  !  " 

I  did  not  go,  but  I  looked  at  the  great  marble  fountain 
with  its  grotesque  beasts  and  Cupids  and  basins,  and 
remembering  the  humble  village  fountain  at  which  the 
carpenter's  daughter  had  filled  her  urn,  I  turned  sharply 
to  the  right  and  found  myself  descending  a  long  sordid 
street  of  sliops  and  stalls,  all  doing  a  busy  trade —  despite 
the  Sunday  —  in  crosses,  rosaries,  crucifixes,  chaplets, 
picture-postcards,  medals,  and  all  the  knick-knacks  of 
holiness.  Sometimes  through  open  windows  of  the  ugly 
one-storey  houses  I  caught  sight  of  the  landscape  below 
—  the  path  descending  to  the  sea,  bordered  with  butter- 
cups and  a-flutter  with  birds,  the  rolling  olive-plains, 
the  strip  of  blue  sea,  the  wonderful  headland.  Never  had 
I  seen  a  lovelier  view  shut  out  by  meaner  buildings.  With 
its  patches  of  refuse  and  its  dreary  shops  and  booths  it  seems 
the  ugliest  street  in  all  Italy,  bearing  on  its  face  the  mark 
of  its  bastard  origin — a  city  grown  up  not  from  natural 
healthy  human  life,  but  for  the  exploitation  of  a  miracle. 

And  this  it  was  that  drew  gold  like  water  from  the 
crowned  heads  of  Europe.  And  this  it  was  that  had 
drawn  hither  even  Descartes,  the  first  Apostle  of  Philo- 
sophic Doubt.  Surely  "  Non  cogito,  ergo  sum,"  is  the 
motto  of  Faith,  I  thought. 

***** 

I  stood  in  a  vast  ancient  market-place  among  canvas- 
covered  stalls,  by  a  lovely  fountain  with  a  smiling  little 
Bacchus  that  faced  an  old  cathedral,  and  I  gazed  like  ten 
thousand  others  at  a  lovely  open-air  pulpit  tliat  rose  in 
the  shadow  of  a  tall  campanile.  From  a  bronze  capital 
it  rose,  girdled  with  beautiful  marble  reliefs  of  dancing 
children  by  Donatello  and  protected  from  the  sun  by  a 
charming  circular  roof,  and  in  this  delectable  coign  of 
vantage  stood  a  priest  holding  something  that  fevered 
the  perspiring  mob. 


THE  CARPENTER'S  WIFE  73 

"  La  sacra  cintola  !     La  sacra  cintola  !  " 

I  knew  what  the  Virgin's  girdle  would  be  like,  for  had 
I  not  seen  her  handing  it  to  St.  Thomas  in  Lippo  Lippi's 
picture  in  this  same  town  of  Prato,  as  she  flew  up  to 
heaven  in  the  radiance  of  her  youth  and  beauty,  standing 
on  cherubs'  heads  and  escorted  by  angels  ?  But  now  so 
far  as  I  could  see  this  tasselled  belt,  it  seemed  to  corre- 
spond ill  with  the  waist  measurement  of  the  little  mother 
of  Nazara. 

Some  white  pigeons  fluttered  round  the  priest's  head 
and  settled  on  the  pulpit,  and  a  great  sigh  of  ecstasy 
went  up  from  the  people. 

I  looked  round  at  the  little  Bacchus.  But  he  was  still 
smiling. 

I  stood  before  an  altar  in  a  little  church,  but  this  time 
a  sweet-faced  woman  in  a  wimple  stood  beside  me. 

"  The  wall  is  behind  the  altar,"  she  said.  "  And  once 
a  year  the  miraculous  image  of  the  Madonna  of  the  Bed 
is  shown  to  the  people  of  Pistoja  and  the  pilgrims, 
exactly  as  Our  Lady  of  the  Graces  impressed  it  on  this 
piece  of  wall  here  when  she  appeared  to  the  sick  girl. 
Very  beautiful  is  she  in  her  crown  and  mantle,  clasping 
to  her  arms  the  crowned  Bambino  as  she  flies  upwards." 

"  And  where  is  the  bed  ?  " 

"  The  bed  was  removed  from  this  sanctuary,  which  it 
blocked  up  disproportionately.  A  separate  little  chapel 
was  built  for  it." 

We  passed  to  the  bed-chapel  by  way  of  the  old  cloisters 
of  the  Ospedale,  and  saw  in  a  small  room  a  heavy  brown- 
ish wooden  bed  with  a  red  quilt,  made  as  for  an  occupant. 
A  Madonna  and  Child  was  painted  on  the  headpiece, 
and  a  Madonna  and  Child  at  the  foot,  and  a  Madonna  and 
Child  hung  on  the  wall. 

"  And  when  was  the  miracle  wrought  ?  "  I  asked. 

"In  1336." 


74  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

The  very  year  of  the  death  of  Cino,  the  poet  of  Pistoja 
and  the  friend  of  Dante,  I  remembered.  And  Dante  and 
Cino  had  receded  into  the  dim  centuries  while  this  bed  with 
its  prosaic  quilt  and  pillows  stood  stolid,  inscribed  at  head  and 
foot  with  inscriptions  dated  1336  and  1334,  begging  me  to 
pray  for  the  souls  of  Condoso  Giovanni  and  Fra  Ducchio. 

"  Here,"  explained  the  sweet  faced  sister,  "the  poor  girl 
had  lain  many  long  years,  incurable,  when  one  day  the  Virgin 
appeared  in  dazzling  beauty,  holding  the  Child,  and  told 
two  little  boys  who  happened  to  be  in  the  hospital  to  fetch 
brother  Jacopo  della  Cappa.  The  venerable  brother,  be- 
ing busy  confessing,  refused  to  be  disturbed,  whereupon 
the  Virgin  sent  a  second  message  bidding  him  come  at 
once,  for  she  desired  him  to  predict  a  pestilence  in  Pistoja, 
of  which  he  would  die  in  a  month.  So  he  came  forthwith, 
but  he  had  scarcely  entered  the  room  when  the  dazzling 
apparition  disappeared.  But  she  left  the  invalid  girl  in 
perfect  health,  and  her  holy  image  on  the  wall." 

"  And  did  Fra  Jacopo  duly  die  ?  " 

"  To  the  day.  And  so  great  was  the  plague  that  there 
was  scarcely  any  one  left  to  administer  the  last  office." 

"  As  disproportionate  as  the  bed  to  the  church,"  I 
thought,  "  to  kill  off  all  Pistoja  and  save  one  bedridden 
girl."  But  how  utter  such  a  thought  to  this  sweet-faced 
sister  ? 

"  Since  then  the  bed  and  the  image  on  the  wall  have 
wrought  many  miracles,"  she  said.  "  The  blind  have  had 
their  siglit,  the  deaf  their  hearing, the  paralysed  their  limbs. 
That  was  why  the  name  was  changed  from  Our  Lady  of  the 
Bed  to  Our  Lady  of  the  Graces.  And  countless  were  the  pil- 
grims that  came.  But  in  1780  the  wicked  Scipione  Ricci, 
who  was  a  secret  Jansenist,  was  made  our  bishop,  and  he 
tried  to  destroy  the  faith  in  our  sanctuary  and  in  the  Girdle 
of  Prato.  But  our  neighbours  of  Prato  rose  against  him, 
rushed  into  the  cathedral,  smashed  his  episcopal  chair,  and 
sacked  his  palace.     He  liad  to   resign  his  bishopric,  and 


THE  CARPENTER'S  WIFE  75 

so  our  faith  was  purged  of  the  heretic,  and  Maria  was 
avenged.  Ah,  that  jubilee  of  her  Immaculate  Conception 
in  190-1  !     It  was  a  day  of  Paradise." 

***** 

Again  a  haze  disturbs  my  vision.  For  a  moment  I  see 
the  little  olive-eyed  Jewess  of  Nazara,  racked  between 
husband  and  son,  wringing  her  impotent  hands  ;  then  my 
vision  clears,  and  I  am  reading  a  printed  Italian  prayer 
before  a  chapel  of  the  Madonna  in  a  mighty  fane. 

"To  THE  Holy  Immaculate  Virgin  of  Hope  Vene- 
rated IN  the  Basilica  op  S.  Frediano 

"  Kneeling  before  you,  Immaculate  Virgin,  Mother  of 
God,  consoler  of  the  afflicted,  refuge  of  sinners,  we  pray 
you  to  turn  upon  us  your  looks  full  of  goodness,  com- 
passion, and  love.  Yon  see  all  our  spiritual  and  temporal 
needs.  Obtain  from  your  divine  Son  sincere  contrition 
for  sin,  light  to  know  the  truth,  force  to  conquer  temp- 
tations, help  to  believe  and  act  as  true  Christians,  patience 
in  tribulations,  peace  of  heart,  holy  perseverance  to  the 
end.  Obtain  for  us  that  there  may  remain  far  from  us 
disease,  pestilence,  hunger,  war,  earthquakes,  fires,  drought, 
flood,  sudden  death.  Take  this  City  under  your  particular 
protection,  preserve  it,  defend  it,  cause  ever  to  reign  therein 
the  spirit  of  religion  and  of  concord,  and  in  private 
families  mutual  charity,  domestic  content,  and  good 
morals.  .  .  .  Whoever  will  devoutly  recite  this  will 
acquire  forty  days'  Indulgence  already  conceded  by  His 
most  Reverend  Excellence  Monsignore  the  Archbishop 
Filippo  Santi. 

''Lucca,  1818." 
***** 

I  seemed  to  be  back  in  Asia  on  a  burning  June  day 
fifteen  hundred  years  before  this  prayer  was  written, 
much  pushed  about  by  the  crowd  that  surged  round  a 
church. 


76  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

"Is  it  the  Whitsuntide  service?"  I  asked  a  priest  at 
last  in  the  Greek  I  heard  on  all  sides. 

"  Nay ;  art  a  barbarian  or  a  worshipper  of  the  Temple 
of  Diana  that  thou  knowest  not  the  Church  of  the  Theo- 
tokos,  and  the  great  Imperial  Council  of  Bishops  that  is 
sitting  there  to  avenge  the  insults  of  Nestorius  to  the 
Virgin  ?  " 

"  What  insults  ?  "  I  murmured. 

"  Surely  thou  hast  snored  in  the  cave  in  the  Pion  Hill 
with  our  Seven  Sleepers !  This  blasphemous  Patriarch 
of  Constantinople  denies  Our  Lady  the  title  Theotokos, 
would  argue  that  she  is  not  Mother  of  God,  but  that  the 
Christ  born  through  her  was  only  the  human  part  of  Him, 
not  the  Eternal  Logos."  His  voice  trembled,  his  beady 
eyes  flamed  with  passion.  "  And  he  dares  come  defend 
his  thesis  here  —  in  Ephesus,  where  the  Holy  Virgin  lies 
buried !  But  our  saintly  Cyril  of  Alexandria  hath  drawn 
up  twelve  anathemas  and  will  stamp  him  out  as  he 
stamped  out  that  minx  Hypatia." 

"  Is  Cyril  here  too,  then  ?  " 

"  Ay,  and  what  an  ambrosial  homily  he  preached  !  '  Hail, 
Mary,  Mother  of  God,  spotless  dove  !  Hail,  Mary,  per- 
petual lamp  at  which  was  kindled  the  Sun  of  Justice  ! 
Hail,  Mary !  Thanks  to  Thee,  the  archangels  rejoice  and 
sing  ;  thanks  to  Thee,  the  Magi  followed  the  star ;  thanks 
to  Thee  the  college  of  Apostles  was  established.  .  .  .'" 
His  voice  died  away  in  reminiscent  ecstasy. 

"  Then  Cyril  and  Nestorius  are  now  in  debate  ?  " 

"Nay,  the  heretic  shrinks  from  appearing  —  he  pretexts 
that  all  the  bishops  are  not  arrived,  and  he  induced  the 
Emperor's  commissioner  to  protest  against  the  sitting. 
But  as  thou  seest,  the  Council  is  going  on  —  hath  been 
going  on  from  early  morn  —  there  are  two  hundred 
bishops." 

"  There  are  only  a  hundred  and  fifty,"  put  in  a  voice. 
"  It  is  scandalous." 


THE  CARPENTER'S  WIFE  77 

"  Ay,"  assented  another  voice.  "  Where  is  the  Patri- 
arch of  Antioch  ?  " 

The  priest  turned  on  the  Nestorians.  "  It  is  beasts  like 
you  with  whom  Paul  fought  here,"  he  said. 

"  Beast  thyself,"  retorted  a  physician  in  a  long  robe, 
"to  suggest  that  God  could  be  contained  in  the  womb." 
It  was  the  beginning  of  a  scuffle  that  grew  to  a  bloody 
battle  between  the  Nestorian  minority  and  the  orthodox. 
Daggers  and  scimitars  gleamed  in  the  air.  I  saw  a  group 
of  Nestorians  take  refuge  in  a  church,  but  fly  from  it 
again,  leaving  a  trail  of  bleeding  corpses  along  the  aisle. 
The  survivors  made  for  the  harbour,  hoping  doubtless  for 
safety  in  the  multitude  of  boats  and  ships. 

And  ever  thicker  grew  the  crowd  surging  round  the 
Council-chamber,  till  at  last  as  the  long  summer  day 
closed,  a  rumbling  as  of  distant  thunder  was  heard  from 
within  —  "  Anathema  !  Anathema  !  "  And  the  cry  passed 
to  the  crowd  —  "  Anathema  I  Anathema  !  "  —  till  the 
whole  firmament  seemed  to  crash  and  rock  with  it  and 
men  cheered  and  danced  and  tossed  their  weapons  in  air. 
And  as  the  venerable  figures  began  to  troop  out  and  the 
word  came  that  Nestorius  was  deposed,  a  thousand  torches 
leapt  as  by  magic  into  flame,  and  men  escorted  the 
Bishops  to  their  lodgings,  leaping  and  singing,  and  lo ! 
round  the  whole  city  blazed  illuminations  and  bonfires. 

And  my  eyes,  piercing  through  the  future,  beheld  Italian 
hottegas  with  immortal  Masters  and  Pupils,  turning  out 
through  the  centuries  portraits  of  the  Madonna  and  Child, 
to  be  blazoned  henceforward  inseparable,  a  symbol  of  the 
true  faith  :  delectable,  innumerable,  filling  the  whole  earth 
with  their  glory. 

^  ^  ^  ^  ife 

The  close  smell  of  the  studios  gave  way  again  to  the 
odour  of  crowded  humanity  and  I  was  in  the  arena  of 
Seville.  But  never,  not  even  at  Easter,  had  I  seen  the 
populace   so   joyous,    the   ladies   shrouded   in   such    rich 


78  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

mantillas  or  flirting  such  precious  fans,  the  picadors  so 
gaily  caparisoned,  the  toreadors  so  daring,  the  bulls  mad- 
dened with  so  many  banderillas  or  disembowelling  so 
many  horses.  It  was  the  mutual  ecstasy  of  slaughter. 
And  from  all  parts  of  the  city  penetrated  the  chiming  of 
bells,  while  the  thunder  of  festive  cannon  sometimes 
drowned  even  the  roar  of  the  ring.  And  at  every  thrill- 
ing stroke  or  perilous  charge  there  came  irom  parted  lips, 
'■'■Ave  Maria  piirissima,^^  or  "  Viva  nuestra  Senora,^^  and 
from  all  around  rose  the  instinctive  reply :  "  Sin  peccado 
coneebida." 

Gradually,  as  I  listened  to  the  conversation  in  the  in- 
tervals of  the  bull  fights,  I  became  aware  of  the  sense  of 
the  Fiesta.  All  this  overflow  of  religious  rapture  sprang 
not  from  the  bulls  but  the  Bull  —  Regis  Pacifici  —  which 
after  centuries  of  passionate  controversy  had  at  last  been 
launched  by  Paul  V.  in  this  sixteen  hundred  and  seven- 
teenth year  from  the  bearing  of  the  Virgin,  forbidding  the 
opponents  of  Immaculate  Conception  to  sustain  their 
doctrine  in  public.  Maria  had  been  conceived  without 
sin.  The  last  flaw  had  been  removed  from  her  perfec- 
tion. 

"  Heaven  rewards  us  for  expelling  the  last  of  the  Moors," 
cried  a  lovely  Seiiora  with  a  dazzling  flash  of  eyes  and 
teeth.  "  And  now  that  we  have  purged  Spain  and  placed 
her  and  her  mighty  possessions  under  the  protection  of  the 
Immaculate  Conception,  her  future  shall  be  even  more 
glorious  than  her  past." 

But  my  reply  was  drowned  by  the  roar  of  the  ring  as 
the  dead  bull  was  trailed  off  at  a  gallop. 

"  Ave  Maria  purissima  !  " 

"  Sin  peccado  coneebida  !  " 

*  »  *  *  » 

I  am  still  in  Spain,  watching  Senor  Bartholome  Est6ban 
Murillo  polish  off  his  Madonnas  for  country  fairs  or  South 
American  convents.      Presently   under   the   guidance  of 


THE  CARPENTER'S  WIFE  79 

Senor  Pacheco,  Holy  Inquisitor  of  pictures,  he  paints  the 
popular  dogma  of  the  day,  in  the  shape  of  little  angels 
floating  below  a  lovely  lady  in  a  blue  mantle  standing 
with  clasped  hands  on  the  earth-ball,  and  the  scene  shifts 
to  France  where  two  centuries  later  the  picture  is  pur- 
chased at  a  fabulous  price  by  the  Louvre  just  before  Pio 
Nono  from  his  refuge  at  Gaeta  publishes  the  Bull  Ineffabilis, 
definitely  declaring  that  the  freedom  of  the  Virgin  from 
original  sin  is  a  divine  revelation.  Cheap  coloured  pictures 
of  the  "Immaculate  Conception"  multiply,  and  Bernadette, 
a  pious  young  shepherdess  in  the  French  Pyrenees,  beholds 
in  a  grotto  by  a  spring  a  White  Lady,  veiled  from  head 
to  foot,  with  a  cerulean  floating  scarf,  a  chaplet  with 
golden  links,  and  two  golden  roses  on  her  naked  feet,  who 
announces  herself  as  "  The  Immaculate  Conception  "  and 
demands  a  Procession  to  her  shrine. 

And  before  my  eyes  unrolls  the  long  panorama,  painted 
in  immortal  colours  by  the  epical  brush  of  Zola :  the 
mushroom  Lourdes  of  hotels  and  holy  shops  replacing 
the  rude  village,  the  Hospital  of  Our  Lady  of  Sorrows, 
the  crowned  statue  of  Our  Lady  of  Salvation,  the  Fathers 
of  the  Grotto,  the  Blue  Sisters,  the  Church  of  the  Rosary, 
the  Basilica  swathed  in  splendid  banners,  glittering  with 
golden  hearts  innumerable,  and  jewels  and  marbles  and 
marvellous  lamps  ;  the  unending  masses  and  litanies,  the 
three  hundred  thousand  pilgrims  a  year,  the  thaumaturgic 
bathing  pools,  unclean,  abominable,  the  White  Train  roll- 
ing through  the  night  with  its  hideous  agglomeration  of 
human  agonies,  amid  ecstatic  canticles  to  the  Madonna, 
the  thirty  thousand  tapers  winding  round  in  leagues  of 
flame  to  the  rhythm  of  interminable  invocations,  the  per- 
petual thunder  of  supplication  breaking  frenziedly  on  the 
figure  of  the  Madonna  framed  in  the  ever-blazing  Grotto. 
***** 

The  thunder  continued,  but  it  was  again  the  roar  of  an 
arena,  though  by  the  towered  old  palaces  round  the  great 


80  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

semi-circle  of  cobbled  piazza  and  by  the  fountain  with  the 
bas-relieifs  of  Christian  virtues  I  knew  I  was  back  in  Italy,  in 
my  beloved  Siena.  But  what  was  this  smoky  flame  that 
shot  skyward,  and  what  was  this  tree  near  the  Christian 
fountain  that  they  were  breaking  up  to  throw  on  the  bon. 
lire  ?  What  was  this  dreadful  sport  that  had  replaced  the 
Palio? 

In  a  vast  pyre  burnt  a  great  huddle  of  writhing  figures, 
whose  shrieks  were  drowned  by  the  fiendish  roar  of  the 
drunken  mob. 

"  llva  Maria  !     Viva  Maria  !  " 

And  I  remembered  that  Siena  had  peculiarly  dedicated 
itself  to  the  Holy  jNIother  was  the  scivitas  Virginis^  and 
that  the  Madonna  was  its  feudal  suzerain,  formally  pre- 
sented with  the  keys  of  its  gates.  Visions  from  the  old 
chronicles  floated  before  me  —  the  dedication  of  1260,  the 
weeping  Syndic  in  his  shirt,  a  rope  round  his  neck,  pros- 
trate with  the  Bishop  before  the  altar  of  the  Virgin,  or 
walking  behind  her  as  she  was  carried  in  the  great  bare- 
foot procession  to  the  chanting  of  Ave  Marias  ;  and  the 
victory  over  Florence  that  duly  followed,  when,  throwing 
her  white  mantle  of  mist  over  her  city,  she  enabled  her 
faithful  feudatories  to  slay  ten  thousand  Florentines  "  as 
a  butcher  slays  animals  in  a  slaughter  house,"  so  that 
the  Malena  ran  bank-high  with  blood,  and  the  region, 
polluted  by  the  carcases  of  eighteen  thousand  horses,  was 
abandoned  to  the  wild  beasts,  and  coins  were  struck  i^i 
her  honour  ;  and  the  renewed  dedications  whenever  the 
Commune  was  in  peril,  the  gorgeous  processions  and  "Te 
Deums,"  the  great  silk  standard  showing  the  Madonna 
rising  into  heaven  over  the  city,  the  Cardinal,  the  Prior, 
the  Captain  of  the  People,  the  Signoria  in  violet  and 
cloaked  as  on  Good  Friday,  the  trumpeters  trumpeting  in 
the  striped  Duomo,  the  feudal  keys  in  a  silver  basin,  the 
fifty  poor  damsels  in  white,  dowered  annually  so  long  as 
the  Virgin  did  her  duty  as  suzerain 


THE  CARPENTER'S   WIFE  81 

But  the  shrieks  from  the  bonfire  brought  me  back  to  the 
moment. 

"  Whom  are  they  burning  ?  "  I  cried  in  horror. 

"  Only  Jews,"  replied  my  neighbour  reassuringly,  and 
indeed,  I  could  now  distinguish  the  Hebrew  death-cries 
of  the  victims. 

"Hear,  O  Israel,  the  Lord  Our  God,  the  Lord  is  One." 

"  We  burn  them  and  the  Tree  of  Liberty  together  !  " 
my  neighbour  chuckled.  "  No  godless  French  Republic 
for  us  !  "  A  fierce  yell  from  the  crowd  underlined  his 
remark.     He  craned  forward,  beaming,  exalted. 

"  They  have  found  another  !  O  Blessed  Virgin  of 
Comfort,  they  have  found  another  !  " 

And  I  perceived,  dragged  along  towards  the  pyre  by  her 
greying  hair,  a  little  olive-eyed  Jewish  mother,  whose  worn 
face  I  seemed  to  recognise  under  her  dishevelled  head-shawl. 

"  Viva  Maria  !   Viva  Maria  !   Viva  la  Madre  di  Dio  !  " 

*  If:  ^  *  ¥/: 

The  spectacle  was  too  horrible.  With  a  convulsive 
shudder  I  shook  off  these  visions  and  rose,  cramped,  to  my 
feet.  The  sun  was  dipping  beyond  the  mountains  of 
Vicenza,  the  peaceful  bell  from  below  was  still  tolling,  the 
air  was  cool  and  delicious.  Now  I  could  continue  my 
climb  to  the  church  of  Our  Lady  of  the  Mountain.  And 
the  loving  epithets  recommenced  —  "  Debellatrix  Incre- 
dulorum^^  '■'•Janua  Goeli^''  "  Turris  Davidica,^^  without 
pause,  without  end.  And  as  I  walked,  other  of  her  count- 
less names  began  crowding  upon  me,  from  "  Our  Lady  of 
Snows,"  to  "  Our  Lady  of  Sorrows,"  from  "  Our  Lady  of 
the  Porringer  "  to  "  The  Queen  of  the  Angels,"  and  all  the 
symbols  of  her,  from  the  Pomegranate  to  the  Sealed  Book, 
from  the  Dove  to  the  Porta  Clausa  ;  and  all  the  myriads 
of  churches  and  altars  that  had  been  dedicated  to  her  from 
Rome  to  Ecuador — from  Milan  Cathedral  with  its  hun- 
dred spires  to  the  humblest  wayside  shrine  of  Sicily  or 
Mexico  —  and  all  the  feasts,  all  the  "  Months  of  Maria," 


82  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

all  the  Pilgrimages,  with  all  the  medals  and  missals,  all 
the  elligies  in  wood  or  wax  or  bronze,  all  the  marbles  and 
mosaics,  from  the  crude  little  black  sacrosanct  Byzantine 
figures  to  the  exquisitely  tender  marble  Pieta  of  Michel- 
angelo, and  all  the  convents  and  orders  she  had  created, 
all  the  Enfants  de  Marie,  and  Serviti  di  Maria,  and  Sisters 
of  the  Immaculate  Conception,  and  all  the  hymns,  anti- 
phons,  litanies,  lections,  carols,  canticles.  The  air  was  full 
of  organ  sounds  and  the  melody  of  soaring  voices.  "  Ave 
Maris  Stella  "  they  sang,  and  "  Salve  Regina,"  and  "  Stabat 
Mater,"  and  then  in  an  infinite  incantation,  sounding  and 
resounding  from  all  the  spaces  of  the  world  :  "  Sa7icta 
Maria^  ora  pro  nobis !  Sancta  Maria^  ora  pro  nobis !  " 
And  her  figure  floated  before  me,  pure,  radiant,  loving,  as 
it  has  floated  before  millions  of  households  for  hundreds  of 
years,  consoling,  blessing,  vitalising. 

And  I  thought  of  her  long  adventure  to  reach  this 
marvellous  apotheosis  :  in  what  a  strange  little  source  this 
mighty  river  had  begun  ;  how  that  looseness  of  the 
Septuagint  translator  in  rendering  the  Hebrew  for 
"  maiden  "  by  "  virgin  "  in  an  utterly  irrelevant  passage  of 
Isaiah  had  led  to  i\Iar3''s  virginity  ;  how  she  had  remained 
a  virgin  through  all  the  vicissitudes  of  her  married  life, 
Joseph  turning  into  a  man  of  eighty  with  children  by  his 
former  wife,  or  even  remaining  virgin  himself,  the  brothers 
of  Jesus  changing  into  his  cousins  ;  how  her  son  had  been 
born  as  a  ray  of  light  or  even  as  an  illusive  appearance  ; 
how,  with  the  growth  of  theology  and  Mariolatry  and 
nunneries  and  monasteries,  she  had  grown  holier  and 
holier,  immaculate,  impeccable,  a  model  to  men  and 
maidens,  the  Queen  of  Heaven,  mighty  beyond  all  the 
saints,  giving  four  feast-days  to  the  Church,  entering  into 
the  liturgy,  redeeming  souls  from  purgatory  on  Assump- 
tion Day,  and  even  sustaining  the  saintly  with  her  milk  ; 
how  her  final  ])urification  from  the  taint  of  original  sin  had 
been  a  stumbling  block  for  the  more  rigid  theologians,  St. 


THE  CARPENTER'S  WIFE  83 

Bernard  opposing  the  festival,  Aquinas  and  the  Dominicans 
denying  the  dogma  against  Duns  Scotus  and  the  Francis- 
cans ;  but  how  the  "  intellectuals  "  —  so  serviceable  to 
the  mob  when  their  logic  found  contorted  reasons  for  the 
popular  faith  —  were  sooner  or  later  swept  aside,  the  harsh 
definers  of  heresy  themselves  left  heretics,  when  they  ran 
counter  to  the  popular  emotion,  the  popular  festivals,  the 
popular  instinct  for  an  ideal  of  purity  and  perfection. 
What  a  curious  play  and  interplay  of  schoolman-logic  and 
living  emotion,  working  ceaselessly  through  the  centuries, 
combining  or  competing  to  re-shape  and  sublimate  the 
carpenter's  wife  till  she  was  wrought  to  the  mould  of  the 
popular  need,  her  very  parents,  unknown  to  the  Gospels, 
becoming,  as  Joachim  and  Anna,  the  centre  of  a  fresh 
cycle  of  legends,  pictures,  Church  festivals.  And  what 
uncountable  volumes  of  monumental  learning  and  jejune 
controversy,  from  Augustus  and  Anselm  and  the  venerable 
Bede  to  the  two  thousand  and  twelve  pages  of  Carlo 
Passaglia  of  Lucca,  the  respondent  to  Renan! 

And  my  thoughts  turned  from  the  theologians  to  the 
poets  and  painters,  to  the  Vergine  Bella  e  di  sol  vestita  — 
the  beautiful  Apocalyptic  Virgin,  clothed  with  the  sun  — 
of  Petrarch,  and  the  weeping  Virgin  of  Tasso,  and  the 
Vergine  Madre  Figlia  del  tuo  Figlio  of  Dante,  and  the 
images  in  all  these  forms  created  by  the  artists,  for  whom 
the  Madonna  sufficed  to  open  all  the  mansions  of  art ; 
who  could  cluster  all  the  poetry  of  the  world  round  her 
glory  or  her  grief,  were  it  rural  loveliness  or  the  beauty  of 
lilies,  or  lofty  architecture,  or  space-rhythm,  or  begemmed 
and  brocaded  attire,  or  the  sculptural  nude  ;  who  set  her 
rich-carved  throne,  adorned  with  arabesques  or  hued  in 
strange  green  and  gold,  amid  palatial  pillars  under  diapered 
ceilings  or  within  glamorous  landscapes,  or  in  the  bowers 
of  roses  or  under  the  shadow  of  lemon-trees  ;  who  even 
crowned  her  with  the  Papal  tiara. 

But  none  of  these  images  would  stay  with  me  :  for  not 


84  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

even  the  triple  crown,  surmounted  by  the  golden  globe 
and  cross,  not  even  this  symbol  of  temporal,  spiritual,  and 
purgatorial  authority,  could  banish  the  worn  face  of  the 
carpenter's  wife  under  the  cheap  head-shawl,  the  little 
olive-eyed  mother  in  Israel,  in  whose  ears  sounded  and 
resounded  the  terrible  words  :  "  Woman,  what  have  I  to 
do  with  thee  ?  " 


THE  EARTH  THE  CENTRE  OF  THE  UNIVERSE : 
OR  THE  ABSURDITY  OF  ASTRONOMY 

From  the  swinging  of  the  bronze  lamp  in  the  nave  of 
Pisa  Cathedral  Galileo  caught  the  idea  of  measuring  Time 
by  the  pendulum  ;  by  the  telescope  he  made  at  Padua 
he  mapped  Space.  Within  a  decade  of  the  burning  of 
Giordano  Bruno  the  heavens  were  opened  up  to  show 
the  infinity  of  worlds,  and  the  heliocentric  teaching  of 
Copernicus  was  confirmed  by  the  revelation  of  Jupiter's 
satellites.  What  the  "  Sidereus  Nuncius  "  of  Galileo  an- 
nounced was  the  end  of  an  era.  By  this  terrible  book  and 
his  terrible  telescope  the  poor  little  earth  was  pushed  out 
of  the  centre  of  the  stage.  The  moon  —  no  longer  teres 
atque  rotuyida  — lost  her  beautiful  spheric  smoothness,  her 
very  light  was  a  loan  —  unrepaid.  Great  Sol,  himself, 
the  old  lord  of  creation,  gradually  sank  to  the  obscure 
coryphaeus  of  some  choric  dance  veering  towards  and 
around  some  ineffable  pivot  in  a  measureless  choragium. 
The  ninefold  vault  engirdling  Dante's  universe  was 
shrivelled  up.  The  cosy  cosmos  was  replaced  by  a  maze 
of  solar  systems,  glory  beyond  glory,  of  milky  ways  that 
were  but  clouds  of  worlds,  thick  as  a  haze  of  summer 
insects  or  a  whirl  of  sand  in  the  Sahara.  The  poor  human 
brain  reeled  in  this  simoom  of  stars,  and  to  complete  its 
confusion,  the  philosophers  hastened  to  assure  it  that  with 
the  universe  no  longer  geocentric,  man  could  no  longer 
flatter  himself  to  be  its  central  interest. 

"  So  many  nobler  bodies  to  create, 
Greater,  so  manifold,  to  this  one  use," 
85 


86  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

appeared  disproportionate  to  Milton's  Adam.  Homo 
could  not  be  the  Master-Builder's  main  concern  —  the 
great  human  tragedy  was  a  by-product.  A  sad  con- 
clusion, and  possibly  a  true  —  but  a  conclusion  utterly 
unwarranted  by  these  premises.  More  sanely  did  the 
beneficent  and  facile  Raphael  remind  the  doubting  Adam, 

"  Whether  heaven  moves  or  earth 
Imports  not." 

The  noble  astronomic  questionings  in  the  eighth  book  of 
"Paradise  Lost"  testify  to  the  ferment  among  the  first 
inhabitants  of  the  new  cosmos  —  Milton  was  born  in  the 
same  year  as  the  telescope  and  met  Galileo  at  Florence  — 
but  despite  the  poet's  half-hearted  protests,  man  has 
swallowed  too  humbly  the  doctrine  that  our  earth  is  not 
the  centre  of  the  universe.  Pray  do  not  confound  me  with 
those  pious  pundits  whose  proofs  of  the  flatness  of  the 
earth  are  still  the  hope  of  a  lingering  sect,  and  a  witness 
to  the  immortality  of  human  stupidity.  I  am  no  Muggle- 
tonian  whose  sun  is  four  miles  from  the  earth.  I  have  no 
lance  to  tilt  against  the  mathematicians  and  their  tubes. 
But  I  fail  to  see  how  the  mere  broadening  out  of  our  uni- 
verse can  displace  Terra  from  the  centre.  Till  we  have 
the  final  and  all-inclusive  chart  of  the  heavens  —  and 
worlds  immeasurable  are  still  beyond  our  ken,  worlds 
whose  light  speeding  to  us  at  eleven  million  miles  or 
so  a  minute  is  still  on  its  waj""  —  how  can  any  one  assert 
conclusively  that  our  earth  is  not  in  the  exact  centre  of 
all  the  systems  ?  That  it  goes  round  the  sun  —  instead  of 
being  the  centre  of  the  sun's  revolution  —  is  nothing 
against  its  supremacy  or  central  status.  The  fire  exists 
for  the  meat,  though  the  spit  revolves  and  not  the  fire. 

And  if  the  earth  be  not  in  the  centre  of  the  systems,  it 
assuredly  remains  at  the  centre  of  Space.  For  by  that 
old  definition  of  Hermes  Trismegistus  to  which  Pascal 
gave  currency,  every  point  of  an  infinite  area  is  really  its 


THE   EARTH   THE  CENTRE  87 

centre,  even  as  no  point  is  its  circumference.  And  in  a 
psychological  sense  too,  wherever  a  spectator  stands  is  the 
centre  of  the  universe. 

But  grant  the  earth  be  not  the  centre  of  Space  or  the 
systems  !  What  then  ?  How  does  it  lose  its  lofty  estate? 
Is  London  at  the  globe's  kernel  ?  Did  the  axis  pass 
through  Rome  ?  Kepler  wasted  much  precious  time  under 
the  current  philosophic  obsession  that  the  orbits  of  the 
planets  must  be  circular  —  since  any  figure  less  perfect 
than  a  circle  were  incompatible  with  their  dignity. 
Hence  the  cumbrous  hypotheses  to  explain  their  apparent 
deviation  from  perfection,  hence  was  the  sphere  girt 

"  With  centric  and  eccentric  scribbled  o'er, 
Cycle  and  epicycle,  orb  in  orb." 

The  same  fallacy  of  symmetry  surely  underlies  the 
notion  that  the  earth  is  dethroned  from  its  hegemony  of 
the  stellar  system  merely  because  the  lines  drawn  to  it  from 
every  ultima  Thule  of  the  universe  are  unequal.  'Tis  a 
confusion  of  geometric  centre  with  centre  of  forces.  It 
may  be  that  just  this  asymmetric  station  was  necessary  for 
the  evolution  of  the  universe's  crowning  race. 

For  if  the  Universe  has  not  its  aim  and  centre  in  man, 
pray  to  what  other  end  all  this  planetary  pother?  If  man 
is  but  a  by-product  of  the  cosmic  laboratory,  what  is  the 
staple  ?  Till  this  question  is  answered,  we  may  safely 
continue  anthropocentric. 

Man  abased  forsooth  by  this  whirl  of  mammoth  worlds! 
Nay,  'tis  our  grandeur  that  stands  exalted,  our  modesty 
that  stands  corrected.  We  did  not  dream  that  our  facture 
required  such  colossal  machinery,  that  to  engender  us  a 
billion  billion  planets  must  be  in  experimental  effervescence. 
A  fig  upon  their  size  !  Do  we  rank  Milton  inferior  to  the 
megatherium  ?  Can  a  man  take  thought  by  adding  a 
cubit  to  his  stature  ?  The  ant  is  wiser  than  the  alligator, 
and  the  sprawling  saurians  of  the  primal  slime  may  have 


88  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

their  analogue  in  the  huge  weltering  worlds  that  have 
never  evolved  a  human  brain.  And  had  the  earth  swollen 
herself  to  the  gross  amplitude  of  the  sun,  her  case  were 
no  better  :  she  would  still  be  —  in  the  infinite  wash  of 
Space  —  a  pebble,  even  as  a  pebble  is  a  stellar  system  in 
miniature.  There  lies  the  paradox  of  infinity.  Nothing 
in  it  is  large  enough  to  be  important — if  quantity  is  the 
criterion  of  importance.  To  be  in  one  spot  of  Space  is  as 
dignified  or  undignified  as  to  be  in  another.  Why,  I 
wonder,  has  position  in  Time  escaped  tliis  invidious  criti- 
cism. As  well  assert  that  nothing  important  can  happen 
or  nothing  that  happens  can  be  important,  because  every- 
thing must  happen  at  a  mere  point  of  Time,  which  is  not 
even  Time's  central  point.  It  was  a  truer  sense  of  values 
that  made  Christendom  and  Islam  boldly  place  their 
foundation  at  Time's  central  point,  up  to  which  or  back 
to  which  all  the  ages  lead.  The  year  One  begins  with 
Christ's  birth,  with  Mohammed's  Hegira.  In  the  same 
spirit,  though  with  a  more  literal  belief,  did  the  old  car- 
tographers draw  their  world  round  Jerusalem  as  a  centre. 
Position  in  Time  or  Space  is  not  the  measure  of  impor- 
tance, but  importance  is  the  measure  of  position  in  Time 
or  Space.  Where  the  highest  life  is  being  lived,  there  is 
the  centre  of  the  world,  and  unless  a  higher  life  is  lived 
elsewhere,  the  centre  of  the  universe.  Not,  where  are  we 
in  Space,  but  are  we  on  tlie  central  lines  of  cosmic  evolu- 
tion ?     That  is  the  question. 

Theology,  then,  stands  where  it  did,  wherever  Terra 
stands.  Not  the  mythical  theology  of  sacred  books,  but 
the  scientific  theology  of  sacred  facts.  The  expansion  of 
the  universe  from  a  mapped  parish  to  a  half-uncharted 
wilderness  of  worlds  cannot  shake  religion  —  a  Deity  is 
more  suitably  lodged  in  infinity  than  on  a  roof-garden  — 
but  it  did  shake  the  Church,  so  recklessly  committed  to  a 
disprovable  cosmogony.  And  the  Church  burnt  books 
and  men  with  its  habitual  consuming  zeal,  denying  the 


THE   EARTH   THE  CENTRE  89 

motion  of  the  earth  as  it  had  denied  the  Antipodes,  cling- 
ing to  an  earth  surrounded  by  menial  planets,  as  it  had 
clung  to  the  flat  plane  of  "  Christian  Topography." 

But  is  there  nothing  to  be  said  for  the  Churchmen  ? 
Were  they  mere  venomous  obscurantists  ?  Nay,  they 
were  patriots  fighting  for  their  father-world,  for  the  cos- 
mos of  their  ancestors,  jpro  aris  et  focis.  They  saw  their 
little  universe  threatened  by  the  rise  of  a  great  stellar 
empire.  They  saw  themselves  about  to  be  swallowed  up 
and  lost  in  its  measureless  magnificence.  And  so  in  a 
frenzy  of  chauvinism  they  gagged  Galileo  and  burned 
Giordano  Bruno,  those  traitors  in  the  camp,  in  league 
with  Reason,  emperor  of  the  stars. 

But  despite  the  Church's  defeat,  our  little  globe  still 
maintains  a  sturdy  independence.  And  until  you  bring 
me  evidence  of  a  superior  genus  I  shall  continue  to  regard 
our  good  red  earth  as  the  centre  of  creation,  and  man  as 
the  focus  of  intercelestial  planetary  forces. 

Millions  of  spiritual  creatures  may  walk  the  earth  un- 
seen, as  Milton  asserts,  and  millions  more  may  be  invisible 
in  Mars  and  the  remoter  seats  of  the  merry-go-round,  but 
de  non  apparentibus  et  de  non  existentihus  eadem  est  ratio. 
It  is  William  James  who  of  all  philosophers  in  the  world 
would  argue  our  fates  regulated  by  superior  beings  with 
whom  we  co-exist  as  with  us  our  cats  and  dogs.  The  anal- 
ogy has  not  even  one  leg  to  stand  on.  The  cat  and  the 
dog  have  solid  proof  of  our  existence,  they  see  and  hear 
us,  and  we  share  with  them  a  large  segment  of  existence. 
Our  anatomy  and  theirs  are  much  of  a  muchness.  They 
divide  with  us  our  food  and  our  drink  and  bask  at  the 
same  fire,  nay,  it  requires  a  vast  conceit  to  look  them  in 
the  face  and  deny  our  kinship.  But  who  save  Gulliver 
hath  beheld  a  bodily  Superman  or  partaken  of  his  meals? 
Even  with  our  spiritual  superiors,  with  our  Shakespeares 
and  Beethovens,  we  have  a  substantial  basis  of  identity. 
The  range  of  thought  which  circumscribes  ours  must  at 


90  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

the  same  time  partially  coincide  with  it,  and  though  our 
thoughts  be  not  wholly  their  thoughts,  their  thoughts  must 
needs  be  partially  ours. 

God  may  be  infinitely  more  than  man,  but  He  is  not 
finitely  less.  Even  a  God  without  humour  would  be — to 
that  extent  —  man's  inferior.  Matthew  Arnold's  gibe  of 
the  "  magnified  non-natural  man "  is  groundless.  I  do 
not  become  a  magnified  non-natural  dog  because  I  have 
attributes  in  common  with  my  terrier.  The  God  of  the- 
ology is  already  divested  of  man's  matter ;  deflate  Him 
likewise  of  man's  spirit,  and  what  remains  ?  In  robbing 
their  Deity  of  all  human  traits  the  de-anthropomorphic 
philosophers  have  overshot  the  mark  and  reduced  Him  to  a 
transcendental  nullity  who  can  neither  be  comprehended 
by  His  creatures  nor  comprehend  them. 

Or  if  they  allow  Him  ideas  and  passions,  they  neutralise 
and  sterilise  them  in  a  frenzy  of  scholastic  paradox. 
"  Amas,  nee  cestuas^""  cries  St.  Augustine,  "  zelas  et  securus 
es ;  pcenitet  te  et  non  doles;  irasceris  et  tranquiUus  e«." 
God  repents,  but  without  regret ;  He  is  angr}^  but  perfectly 
tranquil.  To  evade  the  limitations  of  any  attribute  we 
endow  Him  at  the  same  time  with  its  opposite,  as  who 
should  say  a  white  negro.  But  such  violent  assaults  upon 
the  unthinkable  yield  no  prize  either  of  understanding  or 
of  satisfaction. 

If  "the  love  that  moves  the  sun  and  the  other  stars" 
be  not  that  same  love  which  a  noble  man  may  feel  for  his 
fellow-creatures  of  every  order  of  being,  if  it  be  a  love 
that  is  at  the  same  time  indifference,  or  even  hate,  then  it 
may  equally  be  expressed  as  "  the  hate  which  moves  the 
sun  and  the  other  stars  "  (and  which  is  at  the  same  time 
love).  Or  it  may  find  far  honester  expression  as  the 
agnostic's  unknowable  —  the  X  that  moves  the  sun  and 
the  other  stars.  If  God's  justice  be  not  man's  justice, 
then  it  is  no  justice.  It  must  be  our  justice  —  if  it  is 
justice  at  all — our  justice,  only  occupied  and  obscured  by 


THE   EARTH  THE  CENTRE  91 

innumerable  pros  and  cons  to  us  unknown,  and  extending 
over  times  and  spaces  beyond  our  ken,  so  that  were  we 
placed  in  possession  of  all  the  evidence  we  should  applaud 
the  verdict.  The  philosophers  do  but  narrow  their  God 
under  illusion  of  broadening  Him  —  or  rather  they  broaden 
Him  so  tenuously  that  He  becomes  an  infinite  impalpa- 
bility whose  accidental  evaporation  would  scarcely  be 
noted.  It  was  a  more  consistent  mystic  who  said  :  "  God 
may  not  improperly  be  styled  nothing." 

So  that  our  circumnavigation  of  the  infinite  brings  us 
back  to  our  noble  selves  and  our  own  door-step.  The 
sun  is  still  there  to  give  us  light  by  day,  and  the  moon 
and  stars  still  shine  to  give  us  light  by  night.  Nor  is  it 
less  their  function  to  nourish  us  with  beauty  and  with 
mystery. 

"  When  Science  from  Creation's  face 
Enchantment's  veil  withdraws, 
What  lovely  visions  yield  their  place 
To  cold  material  laws  !  " 

Campbell,  who  thus  complained,  was  no  profound  poet. 
The  laws  are  neither  cold  nor  material,  nor  do  the  lovely 
visions  yield  their  place.  Their  loveliness  is  as  abiding 
as  the  laws  which  produce  them.  'Tis  true  that  at  first 
Galileo  seemed  to  have  profaned  Cynthia,  the  "  goddess 
excellently  bright."  The  moon,  the  beautiful  moon  of 
poets  and  lovers,  lay  betrayed  —  a  dead  planet,  a  scarred 
desolation,  seamed  with  arid  ravines  and  pitted  with  a  pox 
of  craters.  Is  then  the  moon  of  the  poets  a  delusion 
which  science  bids  us  put  away  like  a  childish  toy?  No, 
by  her  own  heavens,  no.  A  more  scientific  science  restores 
the  glamour.  The  moon  has  all  the  beauty  she  appears 
to  have.  The  loveliest  woman's  face,  viewed  through  a 
magnifying  glass,  appears  equally  scarred  and  seamed  and 
pitted.  But  here  'tis  the  lens  that  is  accused  of  falsifica- 
tion, 'tis  the  ugliness  that  is  pronounced  the  delusion — 
a  face  was  meant  to  be  seen  at  a  certain  distance  and  with 


92  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

the  natural  eye.     Even  so  —  and  the  moon  chose  her  dis- 
tance with  admirable  discretion. 

The  synthesis  of  everyday  reality  is  always  man's  cen- 
tral verity.  The  peering  unnatural  scientific  vision  of  the 
moon  has  the  lesser  truth,  is  but  a  spectral  rim  of  the 
whole-orbed  reality.  'Tis  the  poet's  moon  tliat  is  the  full 
moon.  But  the  poet  were  as  foolish  as  the  astronomer  if 
he  in  his  turn  imagined  himself  dealing  with  absolutes,  if 
he  forgot  that  in  logic  as  in  landscape  all  views  depend  on 
the  point  at  which  3'ou  place  yourself.  It  is  only  from  the 
true  point  of  view  that  the  earth  remains  the  centre  of  the 
universe. 


OF  AUTOCOSMS   WITHOUT   FACTS  :     OR   THE 
EMPTINESS   OF   RELIGIONS 

And  what  is  the  invasion  of  our  consciousness  by  the 
extended  stellar  system  to  its  invasion  by  the  intensive 
infinities  of  our  own  globular  parish  ?  The  endless  galaxy 
of  the  centuries  and  the  civilisations  has  opened  out  before 
our  telescopic  thought.  We  are  no  longer  at  the  centre 
of  our  cosmos  —  we  can  no  longer  snuggle  in  a  cosy  con- 
ceptual world,  Classical  or  Christian,  nor  can  we  make  the 
best  of  both  these  worlds,  like  Raphael  or  Milton.  The 
dim  populations  have  become  lurid.  Japan  pours  her  art 
upon  us,  and  her  equal  claim  to  hold  a  chosen  people  — 
"  pursuing,"  as  its  Emperor's  oath  declares,  "  a  policy  co- 
extensive with  the  heavens  and  the  earth."  Egypt  unrolls 
the  teeming  scroll  of  her  immemorial  dynasties.  The 
four  hundred  millions  of  China  lie  on  our  imaginations 
like  a  nightmare  in  yellow,  and  we  perceive  that  the  maker 
of  man  hath  a  predilection  for  pig-tails.  India  opens  out 
her  duskily  magnificent  infinities  and  we  are  grown  famil- 
iar with  Brahma  and  Vishnu,  with  Vedas  and  Buddha- 
Jatakas.  Persia  reveals  to  us  in  the  Zend  Avesta  of  Zoro- 
aster a  strangely  modern  gospel,  glimmering  through 
grotesque  images  of  space  and  time.  Mohammed  is  no 
longer  an  Infidel,  and  we  recognise  the  subtlety  alike  of 
the  Motekallamin  and  the  Arabic  Aristotelians.  We  re- 
spect the  Norse  Gods  and  the  great  Tree  Yggdrasill.  The 
Teutonic  divinities  have  reappeared  in  every  part  of  the 
civilised  earth  and  their  operatic  voice  is  heard  with  more 
reverence  than  any  other  god's.  Even  the  old  Peruvian 
civilisation  solicits  us,  that  successful  social  order  of  the 
Incas.     The  stellar  swirl  of  worlds  is  a  crude  puzzle  in 

93 


94  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

quantity  beside  these  mental  worlds  which  the  peoples 
have  spun  for  themselves  like  cocoons. 

But  not  only  the  peoples.  Each  creature  that  has  ever 
lived,  from  the  spider  to  Shakespeare,  has  spun  for  itself 
its  own  cosmos.  Microcosm  we  cannot  call  this  cosmos, 
since  that  implies  the  macrocosm  drawn  to  a  smaller 
scale,  and  this  —  like  all  creations  —  is  a  mere  selection 
from  the  universe,  excluding  and  including  after  its  own 
idiosyncrasy.  Autocosm  is  the  word  we  need  for  it — a 
new  word,  but  a  phenomenon  as  old  as  the  first  created 
consciousness,  and  a  phenomenon  that  has  never  perfectly 
repeated  itself  since  that  day.  For  no  two  autocosms  have 
ever  been  precisely  alike.  In  the  lower  orders  of  being 
the  autocosm  may  be  substantially  identical  throughout 
all  the  individuals  of  the  species,  but  as  we  mount  in  the 
grade  of  organisation,  the  autocosm  becomes  more  and 
more  individual.  And  even  the  large  generic  autocosms, 
how  variously  compounded  —  the  scent- world  of  dogs,  the 
eye-world  of  birds,  the  uncanny  touch-world  of  bats,  the 
earth-world  of  worms,  the  water-world  of  fishes,  the  gyro- 
scopic world  of  dancing-mice,  the  flesh-world  of  parasites, 
the  microscoi^ic  world  of  microbes.  These  worlds  do  not 
need  untrammelled  orbits,  they  intersect  one  another  in- 
extricably in  an  infinite  interlacing.  Yet  each  is  a  sym- 
metric sphere  of  being,  a  rounded  whole,  and  to  its  denizens 
the  sole  and  self-sufficient  cosmos.  One  creature's  poison 
is  another  creature's  meat,  one  creature's  offal  is  another 
creature's  paradise,  and  our  cemetery  is  a  nursery  aswarm 
with  creeping  mites.  If  on  the  one  hand  Nature  seems  a 
wasteful  housekeeper,  scattering  a  thousand  seeds  that  one 
may  bear,  on  the  other  hand  she  appears  ineffably  ingen- 
ious in  economising  every  ort  and  oddment,  every  cheese- 
paring and  scum-drop  as  the  seed-plot  of  new  and  joyous 
existence.  Life,  like  an  infinite  nebulous  spirit,  bursts  in 
through  every  nook  and  cranny  of  matter,  squeezing  it- 
self into  every  possible  and  improbable  mould,  and  even 


OF  AUTOCOSMS  WITHOUT  FACTS  95 

filling  a  chink  in  an  existing  creature  rather  than  remain 
outside  organisation.  And  each  atom  of  spirit  that  achieves 
material  existence  takes  its  cramped  horizons  for  the  bound- 
aries of  the  universe  and  itself  as  the  centre  of  creation.  Woe 
indeed  to  the  creature  that  has  seen  beyond  its  own  bound- 
aries, that  can  weave  no  cosy  autocosm  to  nestle  in.  This 
is  what  happens  to  your  Shakespeares  and  your  Schopen- 
hauers;  this  is  the  "Everlasting  Nay"  of  "Sartor  Re- 
sartus."     Life  is  become 

"  A  tale 

Told  by  an  idiot,  full  of  sound  and  fury, 

Signifying  nothing." 

Such  an  autocosm  is  the  shirt  of  Nessus.  Hercules 
must  tear  it  off  or  perish.  And  we  are  all  the  time  chang- 
ing our  autocosms.  That  is  the  meaning  of  experience. 
Only  the  fool  dies  in  the  same  cosmos  in  which  he  was 
born,  and  a  great  teacher  or  a  great  statesman  changes  the 
autocosm  of  his  generation. 

Here  be  the  true  weaving  with  which  Time's  Shuttle  is 
busy,  these  endless  patternings  and  re-patternings  of  men- 
tal worlds,  adjusted  to  ever-changing  creatures,  and  ever- 
shifting  circumstances.  The  birth  and  death  of  planets 
is  stability  compared  with  this  mercurial  flux,  which  in 
the  human  world  is  known  as  movements  of  thought  and 
religion,  growths  and  decays  of  language,  periods  of  art 
and  politics.  History  is  the  clash  of  autocosms,  and  every 
war  is  a  war  of  the  worlds. 

As  I  walk  into  Milan  Cathedral,  the  modern  autocosm 
fades  out  with  the  buzz  and  tingle  of  the  electric  cars  that 
engirdle  the  great  old  building,  and  the  massive  walls  of 
the  mediaeval  autocosm  shut  me  into  a  glowing  gloom  of 
unearthly  radiance,  whose  religious  hush  is  accentuated  by 
the  sound  of  soft  bells.  Only  the  dominating  figure  on 
the  cross  seems  out  of  tone ;  this  blood  is  too  violent  for 
peace.  What  a  paradox  that  the  Christians  are  such  dom- 
inant races  —  perhaps  they  needed  this  brake.     But  even 


96  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

without  the  blood,  the  cruciform  dusk  of  the  interior  is  in 
discord  with  the  lace-work  of  the  exterior,  recalls  the  som- 
breness  below  the  glittering  Renaissance.  All  this  multi- 
tudinous microscopic  w^ork  is  waste,  all  this  wealth  of 
fretwork  and  finial,  for  it  is  only  at  a  distance,  when  the 
details  have  faded  into  the  mass,  that  this  mass  appears 
noble.  And  this,  too,  is  like  th«.  Catholic  autocosm,  with 
its  rococo  detail  and  its  massive  magnificence. 

And  round  the  Cathedral,  as  I  said,  rages  the  modern 
order  —  is  not  Milan  the  metropolis  of  Italian  science  and 
do  not  all  tram-roads  lead  to  the  Piazza  del  Duomo  ?  — 
and  a  ballet  I  saw  in  La  Scala  danced  the  carmagnole  of 
the  new  world.  "  Excelsior  "  was  its  jubilant  motto,  the 
ascent  being  from  Cathedrals  to  Railway  Bridges  and 
Balloons.  A  Shining  Spirit  of  Light  (^Luce)  inspired 
Civilta  and  baffled  the  priestly  powers  of  darkness 
{Tenehre'),  while  ineffably  glittering  coryphees  proclaimed 
with  their  toes  "Eureka  !  " 

But  ah  !  my  dear  Corybants  of  Reason,  an  autocosm 
may  be  habitable  and  even  comfortable  in  despite  of 
Science.  Its  working  value  is  independent  of  its  contain- 
ing false  materials,  or  true  materials  in  false  proportions. 
And  yet,  my  dear  devotees  of  Pragmatism  —  that  parvenu 
among  Philosophies  —  its  utility  does  not  establish  its 
truth.  A  false  coin  wdll  do  all  the  work  of  a  true  coin  so 
long  as  it  is  not  found  out.  Nevertheless  there  exists  a 
test  of  coins  independent  of  their  power  of  gulling  the 
public.  And  there  exists  a  name  for  those  who  continue 
to  circulate  a  coin  after  they  know  it  to  be  false.  The 
Pragmatist  may  apply  his  philosophy  to  justify  past  forms 
of  belief  and  action,  now  outmoded,  but  he  will  do  infinite 
mischief  if  he  tries  to  juggle  himself  or  the  world  into 
such  forms  of  belief  or  action  because  they  lead  to  spirit- 
ual and  practical  satisfactions. 

Oh,  what  a  tangled  web  we  weave 
When  first  we  practise  to  believe  ! 


OF  AUTOCOSMS  WITHOUT  FACTS  97 

Nay,  it  is  doubtful  whether  satisfaction  can  come  as  the 
sequel  of  any  but  a  genuine  and  involuntary  belief.  There 
is  much  significance  in  the  story  of  tlie  old  Welsh  lady 
who  desired  the  removal  of  the  mountain  in  front  of  her 
window  and  complained  to  her  pastor  that  all  her  prayers 
had  been  unable  to  move  it  a  single  inch.  "Because  you 
have  not  real  faith,"  was  the  glib  clerical  reply.  Where- 
upon, resolved  to  have  '•'•real  faith,"  the  old  lady  spent  a 
night  of  prayer  on  her  knees  opposite  the  mountain. 
When  morning  came,  and  she  rolled  up  the  blind,  lo  !  the 
mountain  stood  as  before.  "  There  !  "  she  exclaimed. 
"  Just  as  I  expected  !  " 

This  pseudo-faith  is,  I  fear,  all  that  the  Pragmatist  can 
beguile  or  batter  himself  into,  for  if  he  has  real  faith  he 
needs  no  Pragmatism  to  justify  it  by. 

I  grant  you  —  indeed  I  have  always  pointed  out  —  that 
there  is  a  large  area  of  the  autocosm  given  over  to  artistic, 
moral  and  spiritual  truths  which  are  their  own  justifica- 
tion. But  it  is  only  where  there  is  no  objective  test  of 
truth  that  Pontius  Pilate's  question  may  be  answered  with 
the  test  of  success  and  stimulation.  Wherever  it  is  pos- 
sible to  compare  the  autocosm  with  the  macrocosm,  con- 
tradiction must  be  taken  as  the  mark  of  falsity,  and  either 
our  notion  of  the  macrocosm  must  be  amended,  or  our 
autocosm.  Of  course  in  the  last  analysis  the  macrocosm 
is  only  the  autocosm  of  its  age,  but  it  is  the  common 
segment  of  all  the  individual  autocosms.  And  while  they 
are  liable  to  shrivel  up  like  pricked  bladders,  the  objective 
universe  can  only  expand  and  expand. 

Despite  La  Scala  and  its  daedal  Modernism  it  was,  I  fear, 
the  Catholic  autocosm  which  fascinated  me  most  in  Italy, 
with  its  naive  poetry,  its  grossness,  its  sublimity,  and  its 
daring  distortions  of  the  macrocosm.  The  very  clock- 
wheels  in  their  courses  fight  against  reality.  Read  in  the 
great  church  of  S.  Petronio  the  directions  on  the  two 
clocks  of  Fornasini,  one  giving  the  solar  time  in  the  an- 

H 


98  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

tique  Italian  style  —  when  the  hour  varied  with  the  day- 
light—  and  the  other  the  mean  time  of  the  meridian  of 
Bologna.  "  Subtract  the  time  on  the  Italian  clock  from 
2-4  o'clock,  add  the  remainder  to  the  time  indicated  on  the 
other  clock,  but  counted  from  1  to  2-4  o'clock.  TJie  time 
thus  obtained  will  he  the  hour  of  Ave  Maria !  "  The  hour 
of  Ave  Maria  !  Not  some  crude  arithmetical  hour.  Not 
the  hour  of  repose  from  work,  not  the  hour  of  impending 
sunset,  but  the  hour  of  the  vesper  bell,  the  hour  of  Ave 
Maria  !  How  it  circumlaps,  this  atmosphere,  how  it 
weaves  a  veil  of  pity  and  love  between  man  and  the 
macrocosm. 

It  is  nearly  three  and  a  half  centuries  since  Italy  helped 
to  break  the  power  of  the  Paynim  at  Lepanto,  yet  the  be- 
lief that  the  Madonna  (who  could  not  free  her  own  land 
from  the  Turk)  was  the  auxilium  Christianorum,  is  as  lively 
as  on  the  day  w'hen  the  bigoted  Gregory  XIII.  instituted 
the  Feast  of  the  Rosary  to  commemorate  her  victory.  At 
Verona  I  read  in  a  church  a  vast  inscription  set  up  at  the 
tercentenary  of  the  battle,  still  ascribing  the  victory  not 
only  to  the  "  supreme  valour  of  our  arms  steeled  by  the 
word  of  Pius  V.,"  but  also  to  "  the  great  armipotent  Vir- 
gin." Saints  that  I  had  in  my  ignorance  imagined  remote 
from  to-day,  shelved  in  legend  and  picture,  retired  from 
practical  life,  are,  I  found,  still  in  the  full  exercise  of  their 
professional  activities  as  thaumaturgists,  and  scholastic 
philosophers  whose  systems  I  had  skimmed  in  my  youth 
as  archaic  lore,  whom  I  had  conceived  as  buried  in  en- 
cycloptcdias  and  monastic  libraries,  blossom  annually  in 
new  editions.  There  is  the  Angelic  Doctor  —  Preceptor 
as  he  was  styled  on  the  title-pages  —  whom  I  had  thought 
safely  tucked  away  in  the  tenth  canto  of  the  "Paradiso." 
In  the  Seminario  Vescovile  of  Ferrara  I  beheld  the  bulky 
volumes  of  his  "  Summa  Theologize  "  in  the  pious  hands  of 
the  fledgeling  priests,  in  a  class-room  whose  ceiling  bears 
the  sombre  frescoes  with  which  Garofalo  had  enriched  the 


OF  AUTOCOSMS  WITHOUT  FACTS  99 

building  in  its  palmy  days  as  a  Palazzo.  And  the  theology 
has  decayed  far  less  than  the  frescoes.  Still,  that  which 
we  look  upon  as  the  faded  thought  of  the  Middle  Ages 
serves  as  the  fresh  bread  of  life  to  these  youthful  souls. 
Little  did  I  dream  when  I  first  saw  Benozzo  Gozzoli's 
picture  of  The  Triumph  of  St.  Thomas,  or  Taddeo  Gaddi's 
portrayal  of  his  celestial  exaltation  over  the  discomfited 
Arius,  Sabellius  and  Averroes,  that  I  should  see  with  my 
own  eyes  scholars  still  at  the  feet  of  the  3Iagister  studen- 
tium  of  the  thirteenth  century.  Well  may  the  Pope  un- 
daunted launch  his  Encyclicals,  and  the  Osservatore  Romano 
remark  that  "  the  evolution  of  dogma  is  a  logical  nonsense 
for  philosophers  and  a  heresy  for  theologians." 

Pascal  summed  it  up  long  ago  :  "  Truth  on  this  side  of 
the  Pyrenees,  Falsehood  beyond."  What  is  true  in  the 
Piazza  of  St.  Peter  grows  false  as  you  pass  the  Swiss 
Guards.  Catholic  truth,  like  the  Vatican,  is  extra- 
territorial. Why  should  it  concern  itself  with  what  is 
believed  outside  ?  Even  the  Averroist  philosophers  taught 
that  their  results  were  true  only  in  philosophy,  and  that ' 
in  the  realm  of  Catholicism  what  the  Church  taught  was 
true.  And  though  "  impugning  the  known  truth  "  be  one 
of  the  sins  against  the  Holy  Ghost,  the  known  truth  and 
the  Church  truth  show  scant  promise  of  coinciding.  And 
the  triumph  of  St.  Thomas  continues,  as  saint  no  less  than 
as  teacher.  "  Divus  Thomas  Aquinas  "  I  found  him  styled 
in  Perugia.  His  Festo  is  on  March  7,  as  I  read  in  a  pla- 
card in  the  Church  of  S.  Domenico  in  Ferrara. 

"  Festa  deir  Angelico  Dottore 

S.  T.  d'Aquinas 

San  Patrono  delle  Scuole  Cattoliche." 

On  the  day  of  the  Festa  there  is  plenary  indulgence  for 
all  the  faithful.  There  was  another  indulgence  "  per  gli 
ascritti  alia  Milizia  Angelica."  But  whether  the  Angelic 
Militia  are  the  pupils  of  the  Angelic  Doctor  I  am  not 
learned  enough  to  say. 


100  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

His  even  earlier  saintship,  St.  Antony,  not  only  con- 
tinues to  dominate  Padua  from  his  vast  monumental 
Church,  and  enjoy  his  three  June  days  of  Festa  in  his 
nominal  city,  but  his  tutelary  grace  extends  far  beyond. 
In  the  Church  of  San  Spirito  in  the  Via  Ariosto  of  Ferrara, 
the  famous  preacher  to  the  fishes  was  —  after  the  earth- 
quake of  1908  —  the  target  of  three  days  of  prayer.  The 
house  Ariosto  built  himself  in  the  fifteenth  century  stands 
in  the  same  street,  but  Ariosto's  world  of  medieval  chivalry 
is  shattered  into  atoms  while  St.  Antony  still  saves 
Ferrara  from  earthquake. 

Yes  —  allowing  Messina  and  Reggio  to  be  annihilated 
—  the  Saint  in  1908  said  to  the  seismic  forces,  "  So  far 
and  no  farther,"  and  'tis  not  for  me,  whose  umbrella  he 
recovered  on  the  very  day  I  mocked  at  his  pretensions,  to 
resent  his  preferences.  Three  days  of  thanksgiving  (mass 
in  the  morning  at  his  altar  and  prayers  and  Benediction  in 
the  afternoon),  "  per  lo  scampato  flagello  del  Terremoto  " 
rewarded  his  partiality  for  P'errara.  The  town  keeps  doubt- 
less a  morbid  memory  of  earthquakes,  for  from  an  old  Ger- 
man book  printed  at  Augsburg  by  Michael  Manger,  I  learn 
that  the  terrible  Terremoto  of  1570,  "  in  Welschland  am 
Po,"  started  in  Ferrara  on  a  16th  in  the  night  and  lasted 
till  the  21st,  during  which  time  two  hundred  people 
perished,  and  many  houses  with  a  dozen  churches,  monas- 
teries and  nunneries  were  destroyed  in  Ferrara  alone. 
Why  St.  Antony  nodded  on  that  occasion  is  not  explained. 
Nor  why  he  should  have  limited  his  protection  to  the  Jews, 
not  a  man  of  whom  was  injured.  Perhaps  he  had  not  yet 
recognised  the  claim  of  Ferrarese  Christianity  upon  him. 
There  is  a  wistful  note  in  the  prayer  placarded  in  the 
Ferrarese  church  of  San  Francesco.  "  O  great  saint,  com- 
monly called  the  saint  of  Padua,  but  worthy  to  be  called 
the  saint  of  the  world.  .  .  .  You  who  so  often  pressed 
in  your  arms  the  celestial  Bambino  !  " 

Happy  Paduans,  to  whom  this  chronological  prodigy  is 


OF  AUTOCOSMS  WITHOUT  FACTS  101 

securely  attached,  who  indeed  hastened  to  build  a  Cathedral 
round  him  in  the  very  year  of  his  canonisation  (1232). 
Here  amid  crudely  worked  flowers,  crutches,  photographs 
and  other  mementoes  of  his  prowess  the  faithful  may  find 
remission  of  their  sins  or  expiation  of  the  faults  of  their 
dead.  For  what  limit  is  there  to  his  intercessory  power  ? 
Let  me  English  the  prayer  hung  up  in  his  chapel.  Every 
religion  has  its  higher  and  more  sophistic  presentation,  but 
it  is  well  to  turn  from  the  pundits  to  the  people. 

"  Orazione  a  S.  Antonio  di  Padova. 

"  Great  St.  Antony,  the  Church  glories  in  all  the  prerogatives  that 
God  has  favoui-ed  you  with  among  all  the  saints.  Death  is  disarmed 
by  your  power ;  error  is  dissipated  by  your  light.  They  whom  the 
malice  of  man  tries  to  wound  receive  from  you  the  desired  relief. 
The  leprous,  the  sick,  the  crippled,  by  your  virtue  obtain  cure,  and 
the  hurricanes  and  the  tempests  of  the  sea  calm  themselves  at  your 
command;  the  chains  of  slaves  fall  in  pieces  by  your  authority,  and 
the  lost  things  are  found  again  by  your  care  and  return  to  their  legi- 
timate possessors.  All  those  who  invoke  you  with  faith  are  freed  from 
the  evils  and  perils  that  menace  them.  In  fine,  there  is  no  want  to 
which  your  power  and  goodness  do  not  extend." 

Here  the  intermediary  has  practically  superseded  the 
Creator,  even  if  dulia  be  still  distinguished  from  latria. 

Rimini  was  likewise  safeguarded  from  the  earthquake 
of  1908,  but  not  by  St.  Antony.  A  saint  of  its  own,  the 
glorious  Bishop  and  Martyr,  St.  Emidio,  "  compatrone 
della  citta,  protettore  potentissimo  contro  il  flagello  del 
Terremoto,"  received  the  Three  Days'  Solemn  Supplica- 
tion, and  the  Riminese  were  adjured  in  many  a  placard  to 
repeat  their  fathers'  glorious  outburst  of  faith  before  the 
thaumaturgic  images  when  the  city  was  delivered  from  the 
frightful  earthquake  of  1786.  But  on  the  whole  the  saints 
can  scarcely  have  done  their  duty  by  the  old  towered  cities, 
for  all  Italy  is  full  of  the  legend  of  toppled  towers. 

In  war-perils  it  is  the  Archangel  Michael  who  is  the 
power  to  approach.     A  prayer,  ordered  by  Pope  Leo  XIII. 


102  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

to  be  said  in  all  the  churches  of  the  world  on  bended  knees 
after  private  mass,  pleads  to  that  Holy  Prince  of  the 
celestial  legions  to  defend  us  in  battle  and  to  thrust  Satan 
and  other  roving  spirits  of  evil  back  to  Hell.  "  Tuque, 
Princeps  Militise  Coelestis,  Satanam  aliosque  spiritus 
malignos,  qui  ad  perditionem  animarum  pervagantur  in 
mundo,  divina  virtute  in  inferLum  detrude.     Amen." 

That  Satan  still  has  the  entry  of  the  Catholic  autocosm, 
I  was  indeed  not  unav/are.  But  I  was  certainly  taken 
aback  to  find  the  Plague  still  curable  by  Paternosters. 
Yet  this  is  what  I  was  told  in  a  little  church  in  Brescia 
devoted  to  Moretto's  works  and  monument,  and  summing 
up  in  letters  of  gold  the  whole  duty  of  man. 

"  Christians ! 
Bless  the  most  holy  name  of  God  and  of  Jesus, 

Respect  the  Festas, 
Keep  the  Fasts  and  the  Abstinences ! 

In  short,  only  by  Prayer 

And  Penitence  will  cease 

Great  Mortality,  Famine 

And  every  Epidemic." 

I  had  regarded  the  Salute  and  the  other  Plague-Churches 
of  Venice  as  mere  historic  curiosities,  and  written  it  down 
as  an  asset  of  human  thought  that  the  Plague  of  1630  was 
duo  to  the  filthiness  and  congesti'on  of  the  Levantine 
cities.  That  when  60,000  Venetians  died  — "  uno  ster- 
minato  numero"  as  the  tablet  in  the  Salute  says  —  the 
Venetian  Republic  should  with  vermicular  humility  erect 
a  gorgeous  church  in  gratitude  for  the  Death-Angel's 
moderation  —  this  might  pass  in  1630,  like  St.  Rocco's 
neglect  in  performing  only  the  few  desultory  miracles 
recorded  in  the  wooden  bas-reliefs  of  his  choir.  In  the 
seventeenth  century  one  might  even  adore  the  angel  of 
Piero  Negri's  staircase-fresco  of  Venice  Relieved  of  the 
Pest,  tardily  as  he  came  to  relieve  those  ghastly  visions  of 
the  plague-pit    which    Zanchi   has   painted,    facing   him. 


OF  AUTOCOSMS  WITHOUT  FACTS  103 

But  that  in  1836  Venice  should  have  decreed  a  Three 
Days'  Thanksgiving  to  the  "  Deiparse  Virgini  salutari  " 
for  salvation  from  "  the  cholera  fiercely  raging  through 
Europe  "  shows  that  two  centuries  had  made  no  change  in 
the  Catholic  autocosm,  nor  in  the  caprice  of  its  Olympians. 
Venice  had  already  passed  under  the  Napoleonic  reign  of 
pure  reason,  and  in  an  old  poster  of  the  Teatro  Civico  I 
read  an  invitation  to  the  citizens  to  "  democratise  "  the 
soil  of  the  theatre  by  planting  here  the  Tree  of  Liberty 
and  dancing  the  graziosissima  Carmagnola.  But  revolu- 
tions, French  or  other,  leave  undisturbed  the  deep  instinct 
of  humanity  which  demands  that  things  spiritual  shall 
produce  equipollent  effects  in  the  physical  sphere. 

"E  pur  si  muove,"  as  Galileo  said  a  hundred  and  thirty 
years  after  his  death.  The  Catholic  autocosm  and  the 
objective  macrocosm  begin  to  rub  against  each  other  even 
in  the  churches.  Quaintly  enougli,  'tis  over  the  popular 
practice  of  spitting  that  science  and  religion  come  into 
friction.  The  priest  who  convoyed  me  through  the 
Certosa  of  Pavia  seemed  to  regard  his  wonderful  church 
as  a  glorified  spittoon,  and  notices  in  every  church  in  Italy 
make  clear  the  universality  of  the  offence.  But  whereas 
at  Pavia  you  are  asked  "  For  the  decorum  of  the  house  of 
God  do  not  spit  on  the  pavement,"  in  Brescia  the  depreca- 
tion is  headed  :  "  Lotta  Contro  la  Tuberculosi,"  as  though 
the  most  penitent  and  pious  might  be  rewarded  for 
church-going  by  consumption.  The  Cremona  and  Lucca 
churches  compromise :  "Out  of  respect  for  the  house  of 
God  and  for  h3^giene  please  do  not  spit  on  the  pavement." 
In  Verona  the  formula  is  practically  the  same  :  "Decency 
and  hygiene  forbid  to  spit  on  the  pavement."  In  Bologna 
the  modern  autocosm  was,  I  gather,  even  more  victorious, 
for  in  time  of  plague,  some  frescoes  in  S.  Petronio  were 
whitewashed  over.  I  trust  for  the  sake  of  symbolic 
completeness  these  were  frescoes  of  St.  Sebastian  and  St. 
Rocco,  the  protective  plague-saints. 


101  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

A  false  cosmos,  I  said,  like  a  false  coin,  may  be  as  use- 
ful as  a  true  one,  so  long  as  it  is  believed  in.  As  long  as 
the  attrition  of  the  macrocosm  outside  does  not  wear  a  hole 
in  the  Catholic  autocosm,  it  will  keep  its  spheric  inflation. 
For  there  is  nothing  to  wear  a  hole  from  inside,  nothing 
contrary  to  pure  reason,  nothing  inconsistent  with  some- 
thing else.  There  is  no  a  priori  reason  why  saints  should 
not  control  the  chain  of  causation  by  spiritual  forces  as 
engineers  and  doctors  control  it  by  physical  forces  at  the 
bidding  of  intelligence.  There  is  no  formal  ground  for 
denying  that  penitence  puts  cholera  to  flight.  It  is  merely 
a  matter  of  experience  —  and  even  Popes  and  Cardinals  re- 
move to  cooler  places  when  the  pest  breaks  out  at  Rome. 
There  is  no  conceptual  reason  why  there  should  not  be  a 
Purgatory,  nor  why  masses  and  alms  for  the  dead  (or  still 
more  the  emotions  of  love  and  remorse  which  these  repre- 
sent) should  not  enable  us  to  assist  the  posthumous  des- 
tinies of  those  we  have  lost,  nor  why  our  sainted  dead 
should  be  cut  off  from  all  fresh  influence  upon  our  lives. 
It  seems  indeed  monstrous  that  they  should  pass  beyond 
our  yearning  affection.  In  these  and  other  things  the 
Catholic  autocosm  gives  hints  to  the  Creator  and  shows 
how  the  "sorry  scheme  of  things"  may  be  moulded  "nearer 
to  the  heart's  desire."  Nor  is  there  any  reason  why 
there  should  not  be  a  Trinity  or  a  vicarious  Atonement. 
These  concepts,  indeed,  explain  obscurum  per  obscurius  — 

"  No  light  but  rather  darkness  visible  — " 

and  seem  less  natural  and  more  complicated  than  the 
Jewish  theory  of  a  divine  unity  and  a  personal  human 
responsibility.  But  complexity  and  incomprehensibility 
are  not  proofs  of  falsity.  Tertullian,  indeed,  in  his  great 
lyric  cry  of  faith,  would  make  them  proofs  of  truth. 
'■'Certum  est  quia  imposslbile  est.''  And  it  may  be  conceded 
to  Tertullian  that  in  a  universe  of  mystery  all  compact, 
the   word    of   the   enigma   can   scarcely  be   a  platitude. 


OF  AUTOCOSMS  WITHOUT  FACTS  105 

But  there  is  a  limit  to  this  comfortable  canon.  Im- 
possibility can  only  continue  a  source  of  certitude 
so  long  as  transcendental  theological  conceptions  are 
concerned.  But  when,  leaving  the  tenuous  empyrean 
of  metaphysics,  the  Impossible  incarnates  itself  upon 
earth,  it  must  stand  or  fall  by  our  terrestrial  tests  of 
historic  happening,  and  the  canon  should  rather  run : 
Providing  it  has  really  happened,  its  mere  impossibility 
does  not  diminish  its  certitude.  So  that,  per  contra,  if 
it  never  happened  at  all,  its  mere  impossibility  cannot 
guarantee  it.  Impossibility  is  a  quality  it  shares  with 
an  infinite  number  of  propositions,  and  if  it  wishes  to 
single  itself  out  from  the  crowd,  it  must  seek  extraneous 
witnesses  to  character.  And  if  it  fails  in  this  quest,  its 
impossibility  will  not  save  it.  We  may  believe  the 
w?iproved,  but  not  the  c?isproved.  The  true  interpreta- 
tion of  the  universe  must  be  incomprehensible,  my  inter- 
pretation is  incomprehensible,  therefore  my  interpretation 
is  true  —  what  tyro  in  the  logics  will  not  at  a  leap  re- 
cognise the  fallacy  of  the  undistributed  middle?  Yet  on 
this  basis  rest  innumerable  volumes  of  apologetics. 

Nay,  Sir  Thomas  Browne  himself  fell  into  this  "  Vulgar 
Error."  "  Methiuks,"  he  cries,  basing  himself  upon 
Tertullian,  "  there  be  not  impossibilities  enough  in  Reli- 
gion for  an  active  faith  ...  I  love  to  lose  myself 
in  a  mystery,  to  pursue  my  Reason  to  an  0  altitudo  ! " 
As  if  "  0  altitudo  "  is  not  persuable  b}^  the  simplest  Pagan, 
following  the  maze  of  Space  and  Time.  The  author  of 
"  Religio  Medici "  confesses  that  certain  things  in  Genesis 
contradict  Experience  and  History,  but  he  adds  :  "  Yet  I 
do  believe  all  this  is  true,  which,  indeed,  my  Reason  would 
persuade  me  to  be  false  ;  and  this  I  think  is  no  vulgar 
part  of  Faith,  to  believe  a  thing  not  only  above,  but  con- 
trary to  Reason  and  against  the  Arguments  of  our  proper 
Senses."  Pardon  me,  esteemed  Sir  Thomas.  It  is  pre- 
cisely the  vulgar  part   of  Faith  —  Religio  Populi!     It  is 


106  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

putting  the  disproved  and  disprovable  on  the  same  plane 
as  the  unproved  and  the  unprovable,  where  alone  the  ec- 
stasy of  the  0  altitudo  may  be  legitimately  pursued. 

The  friction  between  the  Bible  and  Science  has  grown 
raspier  since  Sir  Thomas's  day,  and  by  a  new  turn  in 
human  folly  we  are  told  that  Science  is  bankrupt — with 
the  implication  that  therefore  the  Bible  is  solvent.  Poor 
old  autocosms  !  They  are  both  bankrupt,  alas  !  Neither 
the  ancient  Bible  nor  the  twentieth  century  Science  can 
pay  twenty  shillings  in  the  pound.  Not  that  the  Bible 
cannot  meet  its  creditors  honourably,  nor  that  Science 
will  not  be  permitted  to  go  on  dealing.  The  salvage  from 
both  is  considerable.  But  neither  can  afford  an  autocosm 
in  which  the  modern  intellect  can  breathe  and  the  modern 
soul  aspire. 

Nor  was  such  work  ever  within  the  capacity  of  Science. 
She,  the  handmaid  of  religion,  forgot  her  place  when  she 
aspired  to  the  pulpit.  And  religion,  with  Time  and 
Space  and  Love  and  Death  for  texts  around  her,  stepped 
down  from  hers  when  slie  persisted  in  preaching  from 
witliered  parchments  of  ambiguous  tenor  and  uncertain 
authorship.  What  can  be  more  pathetic  than  the  joy  of 
orthodoxy  when  the  pick  strikes  some  Old  Testament 
tablet  and  it  is  discovered  that  there  really  was  an  Abra- 
ham or  a  Lot.  As  well  might  a  neo-Pagan  exult  because 
the  excavations  in  Crete  prove  that  the  Minotaur  really 
existed  —  but  as  a  fighting  bull  to  which  toreadors  imported 
from  conquered  Athens  sometimes  fell  victims.  Not  even 
Lot's  wife  supplies  sufficient  salt  to  swallow  Genesis  with. 
The  Old  Testament  autocosm  is  dead  and  buried  —  it  can- 
not be  dug  up  again  by  the  Palestine  Exploration  Fund. 
It  is  no  longer  literally  true,  even  in  the  Vatican,  where, 
if  I  understand  aright,  only  the  miracles  of  the  New 
Testament  still  preserve  their  authenticity. 

"  Things  are  what  they  are,  and  the  consequences  will 
be  what  they  will  be,"  as  the  much-deluded  Butler  remarked. 


OF  AUTOCOSMS  WITHOUT  FACTS  107 

Wherefore,  though  you  imagine  yourself  living  in  your 
autocosm,  you  are  in  truth  inhabiting  the  macrocosm  all 
the  time  and  obnoxious  to  all  its  curious  laws  and  inflexible 
realities.  It  is  as  if,  playing  cards  in  the  smoking-room 
of  a  ship  and  fancying  yourself  at  the  club,  you  should  be 
suddenly  drowned.  Only  by  living  in  the  macrocosm 
itself  can  you  avoid  the  stern  surprises  which  await  those 
who  snuggle  into  autocosms.  Hence  the  perils  of  the 
Catholic  autocosm  for  its  inhabitants.  For  in  the  real 
universe  pestilences  and  earthquakes  are  not  due  to  the 
wrath  of  God.  The  physical  universe  proceeds  on  its  own 
lines,  and  the  religious  motives  of  the  Crusaders  did  not 
prevent  a  Christian  host  from  dying  of  the  putrefying  in- 
fidel corpses  which  it  had  manufactured  so  abundantly. 
Nor  did  heaven  endorse  the  theory  of  the  Children's 
Crusade — that  innocence  could  accomplish  what  was  im- 
possible for  flawed  manhood.  The  poor  innocents  perished 
like  flies,  or  were  sold  into  slavery.  These  things  take 
their  course  as  imperturbably  as  Halley's  comet,  which 
refused  to  budge  an  inch  even  before  the  fulminations  of 
Pope  Callixtus  III.  Nor  is  the  intermission  of  earthquakes 
or  pestilence  to  be  procured  by  the  intercession  of  the 
saints  or  by  the  efficacy  of  their  relics.  A  phial  of  the 
blood  of  Christ  was  carried  about  in  Mantua  during  the 
plague  of  1630,  but  there  were  not  enough  boats  to  carry 
away  the  corpses  to  the  lakes.  It  was  those  marshes  round 
Mantua  that  should  have  been  drained.  But  it  is  in  vain 
God  thunders,  "  Thus  and  thus  are  My  Laws.  I  am 
that  I  am."  Impious  Faith  answers,  "Not  so.  Thou  art 
that  Thou  art  not." 

Pestilence  —  we  know  to-day  —  can  be  averted  by 
closing  the  open  cesspools  and  opening  the  sunless  alleys 
of  media3valism  ;  malaria  can  be  minimised  by  minimising 
mosquitos,  and  earthquakes  can  be  baffled  by  careful 
building  after  the  fashion  of  Japan,  which,  being  an 
earthquake  country,  behaves  as  such.     After  the  Messina 


108  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

earthquake  the  Japanese  Government  sent  two  professors 
—  one  of  seismology  and  the  other  of  architecture  —  to 
study  it  and  to  compare  it  with  the  great  Japanese  earth- 
quake of  1891,  and  they  reported  that  although  the 
Japanese  shock  was  greater  and  the  population  affected 
more  numerous,  the  number  of  Italian  victims  was  four 
hundred  and  thirty  times  as  great  as  the  number  of  Jap- 
anese, and  that  "  about  998  out  of  1000  of  the  number 
killed  in  Messina  must  be  regarded  as  having  fallen 
victims  to  the  seismologically  bad  construction  of  the 
houses."  But  where  reliance  is  placed  on  paternosters 
and  penitence,  how  shall  there  be  equal  zeal  for  antiseptics 
or  structural  precautions  ?  The  censer  tends  to  oust  the 
fumigator,  and  the  priest  the  man  of  action.  "  Too  easily 
resigned  and  too  blindly  hopeful,"  says  the  Messagero  of 
Rome,  commenting  on  the  chaos  that  still  reigns  among 
the  population  of  Messina. 

"  Trust  in  God  and  keep  your  powder  dry "  was  the 
maxim  of  a  Protestant.  Cromwell  but  echoed  the  Psalm- 
ist, "  Blessed  be  the  Lord  my  strength,  which  teacheth 
my  hands  to  war  and  my  fingers  to  fight."  This  is  the 
spirit  that  makes  the  best  of  both  cosms.  The  too  trust- 
ful denizen  of  the  Catholic  autocosm  with  his  damp 
powder  and  his  flaccid  fingers  risks  falling  a  prey  to  the 
first  foe. 

But  the  balance-sheet  is  not  yet  complete.  For  it  may 
be  better  to  live  without  sanitation  or  structural  pre- 
caution and  to  die  at  forty  of  the  plague  or  the  earth- 
quake, after  years  of  belief  in  your  saint  or  your  star,  than 
to  live  a  century  without  God  in  a  bleak  universe  of 
mechanical  law.  True  the  believer  has  the  fear  of  hell, 
but  by  a  happy  insanity  it  does  not  interfere  with  his 
joie  de  vivre.  He  has  had,  indeed,  to  pay  dearly  for  the 
consolation  and  courage  the  Church  has  sold  him  —  since 
we  are  at  the  balance-sheet  let  this  be  said  too  —  and 
seeing   how   in   the   last   analysis  all  this  overwhelming 


OF  AUTOCOSMS  WITHOUT  FACTS  109 

ecclesiastic  splendour  has  come  out  of  the  toil  of  the 
masses,  I  cannot  help  wondering  whether  the  Church 
could  not  have  done  the  thing  cheaper.  Were  these 
glittering  vestments  and  soaring  columns  so  absolutely 
essential  to  the  cult  of  the  manger-born  God  ? 

But  perhaps  it  was  the  People's  only  chance  of  Mag- 
nificence. And  after  all  the  mediaeval  cathedrals  were 
as  much  public  assembly  rooms  as  churches. 

Dear  wrinkled  contadine  whom  I  see  prostrated  in 
chapels  before  your  therapeutic  saints ;  dear  gnarled 
facchiiii  whose  shoulders  bow  beneath  the  gentler  burden 
of  adoration ;  poor  world-worn  beings  whom  I  watch 
genuflecting  and  sprinkling  yourselves  with  the  water 
of  life  as  the  spacious  hush  and  the  roseate  dimness  of 
the  great  cathedral  fall  round  you  ;  and  you,  proud 
young  Venetian  housewife,  whose  baby  was  carried  to 
baptism  in  a  sort  of  cage,  and  who  turned  to  me  with 
that  heavenly  smile  after  the  dipping  and  that  rapturous 
cry,  "  Ora  ella  e  una  piccola  Cristiana !  "  and  most  of  all 
you,  heart-stricken  mothers  whose  little  ones  have  gone 
up  to  play  with  the  Madonna's  bambino,  think  ye  I  would 
prick  your  autocosm  with  my  quill  or  withdraw  one 
single  ray  from  the  haloes  of  your  guardian  genii  ?  Nay, 
I  pray  that  in  that  foreign  land  of  death  to  which  we 
must  all  emigrate  ye  may  find  more  Christian  considera- 
tion than  meets  the  emigrants  to  England  or  America. 
May  your  Christ  be  waiting  at  the  haven  ready  to 
protect  you  against  the  exactions  of  Charon,  to  rescue 
you  from  the  crimps,  and  initiate  you  into  the  alien  life. 
Only  one  thing  I  ask  of  you — do  not,  I  pray  you  in 
return,  burn  up  m^  autocosm  —  and  me  with  it.  And 
ye,  gentlemen  of  the  cassock  and  the  tonsure,  continue, 
unmolested  by  me,  your  processions  and  your  pageants  and 
your  mystic  operas  and  ballets,  your  drinking  ceremonials 
and  serviette-wipings,  for,  bland  and  fatherly  as  you 
seem,  you  are  the  fiercest  incendiaries  the  world  has  ever 


110  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

l^nown  —  the  arson  of  rival  autocosms  your  favourite 
virtue.  And  I  am  not  of  those  who  hold  your  power 
or  passion  extinct.  Even  in  your  ashes  live  your  wonted 
fires,  and  I  may  yet  see  the  pyres  of  Smithfield  blaze  as 
in  the  days  of  Mary.  For  to  hold  the  keys  of  Heaven 
and  Hell  is  as  unsettling  as  any  other  form  of  monopoly. 
Human  nature  cannot  stand  it.  And  by  every  channel, 
apert  or  subterranean,  you  are  creeping  back  to  power, 
carrying  through  all  your  labyrinths  that  terrible  touch 
of  faith.  Already  relics  have  been  borne  in  procession 
at  Westminster.  But  perhaps  I  wrong  you.  Perhaps 
your  very  Inquisition  will  make  some  concession  to 
science  and  the  age,  and  electrocute  instead  of  burning. 

But  though  ye  burn  me  or  electrocute,  yet  must  I  praise 
your  Church  for  its  three  great  principles  of  Democracy, 
Cosmopolitanism,  and  Female  Equality.  At  the  apogee 
of  its  splendour,  in  the  days  before  its  autocosm  contra- 
dicted the  known  macrocosm,  it  made  a  brotherhood  of 
Man  and  a  United  States  of  Europe,  and  St.  Catherine 
and  St.  Clara  ranked  with  St.  F'rancis  and  St.  Dominic. 
What  can  be  more  wonderful  than  that  an  English  menial, 
phiin  Nicholas  Breakspeare,  should  rise  into  Pope  Adrian 
IV.  and  should  crown  Barbarossa  at  Rome  as  Emperor  of 
the  Holy  Roman  Empire,  or  that  when  this  Empire's 
fourth  Henry  must  fain  go  to  Canossa  it  was  the  reputed 
son  of  a  carpenter  that  kept  liim  waiting  barefooted  in 
tlie  snow  ?  Contrast  all  this  with  the  commercial  chau- 
vinism, the  snobbery,  and  the  Mussulman  disdain  of  woman 
into  which  Europe  has  fallen  since  tlie  "Dark  Ages." 

I  grant  that  the  Papacy  was  as  far  from  ensuring  a 
liuman  brotherhood  as  the  Holy  Roman  Empire  was  from 
tlie  ideal  of  Petrarch,  yet  both  institutions  kept  the  ideal 
of  a  unity  of  civilisation  alive,  and  if  they  did  not  realise 
it  better,  was  it  not  because  two  institutions  aiming  at  the 
same  unification  are  already  a  disturbing  duality  ?  The 
situation  under  which  the  Emperor  elected  the  Pope  who 


OF  AUTOCOSMS  WITHOUT  FACTS  111 

consecrated  the  Emperor,  or  the  Pope  excommunicated 
the  Emperor  who  deposed  the  Pope  and  elected  an  anti- 
Pope,  was  positively  Gilbertian,  and  the  grim  comedy 
reached  its  climax  when  Pope  and  anti-Pope  used  their 
respective  churches  as  fortresses.  The  old  duel  persists 
to-day  in  the  tug-of-war  between  Court  and  Vatican,  and 
the  Pope  is  so  little  a  force  for  unification  that  he  still 
refuses  to  recognise  the  unity  of  Italy.  Yet  no  ironies  of 
history  can  destroy  the  beauty  of  the  Catholic  concept. 

"  I  lift  mine  eyes  and  all  the  windows  blaze 
With  forms  of  Saints  and  holy  men  who  died, 
Here  martyred  and  hereafter  glorified ; 
And  the  great  Rose  upon  its  leaves  displays 
Christ's  Triumph,  and  the  angelic  roundelays, 
With  splendour  upon  splendour  nmltiplied; 
And  Beatrice  again  at  Dante's  side 
No  more  rebukes,  but  smiles  her  words  of  praise. 

And  then  the  organ  sounds,  and  unseen  choirs 
Sing  the  old  Latin  hymns  of  peace  and  love 
And  benedictions  of  the  Holy  Ghost; 
And  the  melodious  bells  among  the  spires 
O'er  all  the  house-tops  and  through  heaven  above 
Proclaim  the  elevation  of  the  Host." 

That  is  the  Catholic  autocosm  at  its  loveliest,  as  seen 
by  the  poet  of  the  Pilgrim  Fathers  when  under  the  spell 
of  translating  Dante.  And  'tis,  indeed,  no  untrue  vision 
of  its  ideal. 

I  saw  an  old  statue  of  St.  Zeno  in  his  church  at  Verona, 
and  the  saint  who  began  life  as  a  fisherman  appeared  as 
proud  of  his  fish  pendent  as  of  his  crozier.  Can  one 
imagine  a  British  bishop  in  a  fishmonger's  apron  ?  Even 
the  Apostles  are  doubtless  conceived  at  the  Athenaium 
Club  as  a  sort  of  Fishmongers'  Company,  with  an  old  hall 
and  a  'scutcheon.  For  England  combines  with  her  dis- 
trust of  High  Church  a  ritual  of  High  Life,  which  is  the 
most  meticulous  and  sacrosanct  in  the  world. 


112  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

Nor  is  there  any  record  of  a  British  bishop  behaving 
like  St.  Zeno  when  the  Emperor  Gallienus  gave  him  the 
crown  from  off  his  own  head,  and  the  saint  requested  per- 
mission to  sell  it  for  the  benefit  of  the  poor.  True,  British 
bishops  are  not  in  the  habit  of  exorcising  demons  from  the 
daughters  of  emperors,  but  neither  are  they  in  the  habit  of 
dividing  their  stipends  among  curates  with  large  families. 

St.  Zeno,  by  the  way,  came  from  Mauretania,  and  St. 
Antony  was  not  really  of  Padua,  but  of  Portugal.  'Twas 
a  free  trade  in  saints.  There  was  no  protection  against 
protectors.  Virgil  and  Boethius  themselves  enjoyed  a 
Christian  reputation.  One  does  not  wonder  that  even 
Buddha  crept  into  the  calendar  by  an  inspired  error.  It 
is  heartening  to  come  on  an  altar  in  Verona  to  St.  Remigio, 
"  apostle  of  tlie  generous  nation  of  the  French,"  to  find 
Lucca  Cathedral  given  over  to  an  Irish  saint  and  honouring 
a  Scotch  king  ("  San  Riccardo,  Re  di  Scozia  "),  and  to  read 
of  King  Canute  treating  with  Pope  John  and  Emperor 
Conrad  for  free  Alpine  passes  to  Rome  for  English  pilgrims. 
Universities  too  were  really  universal.  The  Angelic 
Doctor  was  equally  at  home  in  Naples,  Paris,  and  Co- 
logne. 

What  can  be  more  nobly  catholic  than  the  prayer  I 
found  pasted  outside  Italian  churches  :  "  My  God,  I  offer 
Thee  all  the  masses  which  are  being  celebrated  to-day  in 
all  the  world  for  the  sinners  who  are  in  agony  and  who 
must  die  to-day.  May  the  most  precious  Blood  of  Jesus 
the  Redeemer  obtain  for  them  mercy  !  "  True,  the  poetry 
of  this  prayer  is  rather  marred  by  the  precise  information 
that  "  every  day  in  the  universe  about  140,000  persons 
die:  97  every  minute,  51  millions  every  year,"  but  not  so 
grossly  as  by  the  indulgences  accorded  to  the  utterers. 
Why  must  this  fine  altruism  be  thus  tainted  ?  But,  alas ! 
Catholicism  perpetually  appears  the  caricature  of  a  great 
concept.  Take  for  another  example  the  methods  of 
canonisation,  by  which  he  or  she  who  dies  "  in  the  odour 


OF  AUTOCOSMS  WITHOUT  FACTS  113 

of  piety  "  may  pass,  in  the  course  of  centuries,  from  the 
degree  of  venerable  servant  of  God  to  the  apogee  of 
blessed  saintship.  What  can  be  grander  than  this  notion 
of  taking  all  time  as  all  earth  for  the  Church's  province  ? 
Yet  consider  the  final  test.  The  great  souls  she  has 
produced  must  work  two  posthumous  miracles,  forsooth, 
before  they  can  be  esteemed  saints.  By  what  a  perver- 
sion of  the  spiritual  is  it  that  holiness  has  come  to  be  on  a 
par  with  pills  !  Surely  a  true  Church  Universal  should 
canonise  for  goodness  of  life,  not  for  mortuary  miracles. 
Joan  of  Arc,  who  must  wait  nigh  five  hundred  years  for 
saintship  —  did  not  the  miracle  of  her  life  outweigh  any 
possible  prowess  of  her  relics  ? 

But  despite,  or  rather  because  of,  this  grossness,  the 
walls  of  the  Catholic  autocosm  are  still  stout  :  centuries 
of  friction  with  the  macrocosm  will  be  needed  to  wear 
them  away.  The  love  of  noble  ritual  and  noble  buildings, 
of  ordered  fasts  and  feasts,  of  authority  absolute ;  the 
comfortable  concreteness  of  Orthodoxy  beside  the  nebulous- 
ness  of  Modernism  ;  the  sinfulness  of  humanity,  its  help- 
lessness before  the  tragic  mysteries  of  life  and  death  ;  the 
peace  of  confession,  the  therapeia  of  chance  and  hypnotism, 
the  magnetism  of  a  secular  tradition,  the  vis  inertice  —  all 
these  are  pillars  of  the  mighty  fabric  of  St.  Peter.  But 
even  these  would  be  as  reeds  but  for  the  massive  prop  of 
endowments.  'Tis  Mortmain  —  the  dead  hand  —  that 
keeps  back  Modernism.  So  long  as  any  institution  pos- 
sesses funds,  there  will  never  be  any  lack  of  persons  to 
administer  them.  This  is  the  secret  of  all  succcesful 
foundations.  The  rock  on  which  the  Church  is  founded 
is  a  gold-reef.  And  it  is  actively  defended  by  Persecution 
and  the  Index,  by  which  all  thought  is  equally  excluded, 
be  it  a  Darwin's  or  a  Gioberti's,  a  Zola's  or  a  Tyrrell's. 
Who  then  shall  set  a  term  to  its  stability  ? 

With  such  a  marvellous  machinery  at  hand  for  the 
Church  Universal  of  the  future  —  so  democratic,  so  cosmo- 


114  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

politan,  so  free  from  sex  injustice  —  it  seems  a  thousand 
pities  tliat  there  is  nothing  to  be  done  with  it  but  to  scrap 
it.  Surely  it  should  be  adapted  to  the  macrocosm,  brouglit 
into  harmony  with  the  modern  mind,  so  that,  becoming 
again  the  mistress  of  our  distracted  and  divided  world, 
moderating  the  frenzy  of  nationalisms  by  a  European 
cult  and  a  European  culture,  keeping  in  their  place  the 
mediocrities  who  are  seated  on  our  thrones,  and  the 
democracies  when  they  stray  from  wisdom,  it  could  send 
out  a  true  blessing  urbi  et  orhi.  But  this,  I  remember,  is 
an  Italian  fantasy. 


OF   FACTS   WITHOUT   AUTOCOSMS  :     OR   THE 
IRRELEVANCY   OF   SCIENCE 

I  DID  not  need  the  lesson  of  the  Scala  ballet  —  Civilta 
inspired  by  Luce  and  chasing  Tenebre.  I  know  that  that 
light  is  electric.  Have  I  not  found  it  in  the  deepest  crj^pt 
of  the  underground  cathedral  of  Brescia,  illuminating  the 
two  Corinthian  pillars  from  the  Temple  of  Vespasius  ? 
Have  I  not  seen  in  the  quaint  sleepy  alleys  of  rock-set 
Orvieto  the  wayside  shrine  of  the  Madonna  utilised  to  hold 
an  electric  lamp  ?  And  have  I  not  seen  that  ancient  mar- 
ble shrine  between  Carrara  and  Avenza  supporting  the 
telegraph  wires,  or  the  crumbling  tower  of  Lucca  the  tele- 
phones ?  And  did  I  not  watch  the  thousand-year-old 
cathedral  of  Genoa  —  with  St.  Lorenzo's  martyrdom  on 
its  f agade  —  preparing  to  celebrate  the  fourth  centenary 
of  St.  Caterina  —  "  whose  mortal  remains  in  their  urn  have 
not  felt  the  injury  of  time  "  —  by  a  thorough  cleansing 
with  a  vacuum  cleaner  ?  Ceaselessly  throbbed  the  engine, 
like  the  purr  of  a  pious  congregation,  and  the  hose  ex- 
tended to  the  uttermost  ledges  of  the  roof,  sucking  in  dust 
immemorially  undisturbed.  And  the  cathedral  clock  of 
Verona  that  looks  down  on  Charlemagne's  paladins,  Ro- 
land and  Oliver,  in  rude  stone  —  did  it  not  tell  me  the 
correct  time  ?     Yes,  'tis  the  hour  of  Science. 

And  the  contribution  of  Italy  to  Science  is  almost  as 
great  as  her  contribution  to  Art  or  Religion.  A  country 
that  can  produce  St.  Francis,  Michelangelo,  and  Galileo, 
that  founded  at  Verona  the  first  geological  museum  and 
at  Pisa  the  first  botanical  garden,  has  indeed  all  winds  of 
the  spirit  blowing  through  her.     But  except  in  Da  Vinci, 

116 


116  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

Alt  and  Science  have  not  been  able  to  lodge  together. 
Ilini  the  sketches  for  his  flying-machines  in  the  Ambrosian 
library  make  a  boon-fellow  of  Wright,  Voisin,  and  Santos, 
as  Luca  Beltrami  enthusiastically  proclaims.  Galileo  had 
some  pretensions  to  letters,  writing  essays  and  verses,  and 
is  even  suspected  of  a  comedy.  But  the  life  of  Galileo 
practically  divides  Italy's  art  period  from  her  scientific,  so 
far  at  least  as  the  material  arts  are  concerned.  His  aman- 
uensis, Torricelli,  preluded  the  barometer,  and  the  crea- 
tion of  electrical  science  by  Galvani  and  Volta  was  a 
main  factor  in  the  evolution  of  our  modern  world  of 
machinery.  Venice  and  Florence  founded  statistical 
science,  and  if  Sicily  and  South  Italy  have  relapsed  from 
the  Arabic-Aristotelian  stimulus  administered  by  Freder- 
ick II.  — perhaps  for  fear  of  sharing  the  imperial  Epicu- 
rean's furnace  in  the  Sixth  Circle  of  the  Inferno  —  North 
Italy  has  remained  a  pioneer  of  the  modern.  It  is  not  by 
accident  that  Marconi  was  born  in  Bologna,  or  Lombroso 
in  Verona — which  is  to  hold  his  statue  —  or  that  the 
most  learned  exponent  of  the  dismal  science  of  our  day 
has  been  Luigi  Cossa,  Professor  of  Political  Economy  in 
the  Universities  of  Pavia  and  j\Iilan.  But  even  Naples 
and  Palermo  have  remained  faithful  to  astronomy  and 
the  mathematics. 

F'ar  be  it  from  me  to  say  a  word  against  Science  as  a 
magnified  magical  maid-of-all-work  !  But  in  so  far  as  she 
pretends  to  set  up  in  the  parlour,  ousting  her  old  mis- 
tresses. Theology  and  Poetry,  let  me  point  out  to  her  swains, 
the  electro-plated  youth  of  Lombardy,  that  the  facts  of 
Science,  existing  as  they  do  outside  autocosms,  are  as  sub- 
stantial to  lean  upon  as  the  shadows  of  reeds.  Of  the 
need  of  a  Seientia  Scientiarum  to  put  all  these  facts  in 
their  place  the  average  scientific  specialist  is  as  uncon- 
scious as  a  ploughboy  of  the  calculus. 

For  it  follows  from  the  doctrine  of  autocosms  that  a 
fact   cannot   exist   as   such    till   it   has  settled  to  which 


OF  FACTS  WITHOUT  AUTOCOSMS  117 

autocosm  it  belongs.  It  must  be  born  into  the  world  of 
meaning.  The  same  raw  material  may  go  to  form  part  of 
autocosms  innumerable,  as  the  same  man  may  be  the  but- 
ler at  a  duke's,  the  guest  of  honour  at  a  grocer's,  and  the 
chief  dish  at  a  cannibal  banquet.  The  same  fire  that 
beacons  a  ship  from  destruction  sucks  a  moth  to  its  doom, 
and  the  same  election  figures  scatter  at  once  delight  and 
despair.  The  "  fact,"  outside  an  autocosm,  can  only  be 
regarded  as  a  potentiality  of  entering  into  ratios  ;  in 
other  words,  it  is  a  "  rational "  possibility.  But  since 
there  is  a  definite  limit  to  its  possibilities,  and  an  election 
result  cannot  glut  the  cannibal  appetite,  nor  a  butler 
operate  as  a  beacon-fire  —  except  in  the  way  of  Ridley 
and  Latimer  —  we  are  compelled  to  recognise  an  obstinate 
objective  element  fatal  to  the  Pragmatic  Philosophy. 
Potential  facts  are  stubborn  things.  Pragmatism  was  a 
healthy  reaction  against  the  obsession  of  a  world  wholly 
gaugeable  by  Reason,  like  the  reaction  of  Duns  Scotus 
against  Aquinas,  but  when  it  replaced  Reason  by  Will  it 
fell  into  the  other  extreme  of  error.  Both  Reason  and 
Will  must  enter  into  the  Science  of  Sciences,  and  they 
must  even  be  supplemented  by  Emotion. 

For  the  human  consciousness,  our  sole  instrument  for 
apprehending  the  world,  is  trinitarian.  I  should  say  we 
have  three  antennse  —  Reason,  Will,  Emotion  —  where- 
with to  grope  out  into  our  environment,  were  it  not  that 
those  antennee  are  triune,  and  no  knowledge  of  the  outer 
world  ever  comes  to  us  save  with  all  the  three  factors 
intertwined  in  varying  proportions.  Why  then  should 
we  throw  away  all  that  Will  and  Emotion  tell  us,  putting 
asunder  what  God  has  put  together  ?  To  represent  the 
Report  of  the  bare  intellectual  faculty  as  the  Report  of 
the  whole  Commission  is  fraudulence.  Will  and  Emotion 
have  too  meekly  contented  themselves  with  a  Minority 
Report.  It  is  time  they  insisted  on  their  views  colouring 
and  fusing  into  the  Report  Proper.     Even  Kant,  having 


118  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

reached  spiritual  bankrui)tcy  by  his  "Critique  of  Pure 
Reason,"  apologetically  called  in  the  Practical  Reason  to 
save  the  situation,  thereby  importing  into  his  system  an 
absurd  dualism.  Kant's  Practical  Reason  is  simply  Will 
and  Emotion  restored  to  their  proper  rank  as  conjoint 
antennaB  of  apprehension.  The  effort  to  probe  the 
universe  with  an  isolated  antenna  was  foredoomed  to 
failure.  The  Practical  Reason  should  have  been  called  in, 
not  after  the  bankruptcy  as  a  sort  of  receiver  to  make  the 
best  of  a  bad  estate,  but  before  starting  operations,  as  a 
partner  with  additional  capital. 

A  fact,  then,  to  be  a  fact,  must  be  born  into  an  autocosm, 
must  be  caught  up  not  only  into  intellectual  perception, 
but  into  emotional  and  volitional  relations.  The  so-called 
scientific  fact  is  thus  two-thirds  unborn.  It  is  not  a  fact, 
but  a  facet  of  a  fact.  'Tis  only  by  a  shorthand  conven- 
tion, indeed,  that  anything  can  be  treated  as  purely  an 
object  of  intellectual  discrimination.  Every  substantive 
in  the  dictionary  is  a  shrivelled  leaf  which  requires  the 
sap  and  greenness  of  a  living  sentence  to  restore  it  to  life. 
This  is  best  seen  in  words  with  more  than  one  meaning, 
like  "bark,"  which  needs  to  be  in  a  sentence  to  show 
whether  it  is  canine  or  marine.  But  every  word  is  in  the 
same  ambiguous  case,  and  acquires  its  nuance  from  its 
relations  with  life.  The  molecule  or  structural  unit  of 
reality  being  thus  triune,  it  is  obvious  that  the  isolated 
presentation  of  the  material  aspect  of  things  in  the  shape 
of  words  under  the  name  of  Science  can  never  be  a  presen- 
tation of  Truth.  It  is  a  mere  abstraction  from  the  trini- 
tarian  wholeness  of  experience.  Full  life  exists  in  three 
dimensions.  Art  in  two,  and  Science  in  one,  like  a  solid,  a 
superficies,  and  a  line,  and  the  line  as  little  reproduces  the 
plenitude  of  being  as  the  coast-line  of  a  map  the  beetling 
cliffs  and  thundering  seas. 

But  the  subject-matter  of  the  sciences  is  not  even  the 
universe  treated  as  a  material  whole,  but  the  universe  cut 


OF  FACTS  WITHOUT  AUTOCOSMS  119 

up  into  abstract  'ologies  and  'onomies,  each  of  which  in- 
sidiously tends  to  swell  into  a  full-seeming  sphere  of 
Truth,  as  when  Political  Economy,  having  proved  that 
Free  Trade  produces  the  cheapest  article,  tends  to  assume 
that  humanity  is  therefore  hou7id  to  buy  in  the  cheapest 
market  ;  so  that  even  the  Tariff  Reformer,  under  the  same 
hypnosis,  seeks  to  deny  this  economic  law,  instead  of  ad- 
mitting and  overriding  it  by  considerations  from  supple- 
mentary spheres  of  Truth.  Similar  fallacies  spring  from 
pathology,  psychology,  physiology,  criminology,  and  other 
methods  of  vivisecting  our  noble  selves.  We  are  parcelled 
out  among  the  professors,  each  of  them  magnifying  his 
office. 

"Hark,  hark,  the  lark  at  Heaven's  gate  sings  1" 

says  the  beautiful  song  in  "Cymbeline."  The  sciences 
pounce  upon  that  lark  like  hawks,  and  tear  it  to  pieces  be- 
tween them.  But  the  truth  about  the  lark  —  is  it  in  the 
unreal  abstractions  of  the  sciences,  or  is  it  in  the  poet's  per- 
ception of  the  lark  in  all  the  fulness,  colour,  and  richness  of 
actual  existence  ? 

The  little  Gradgrinds,  says  Dickens,  had  cabinets  in  va- 
rious departments  of  science.  "  They  had  a  little  chrono- 
logical cabinet,  and  a  little  metallurgical  cabinet,  and  a 
little  mineralogical  cabinet,  and  the  specimens  were  all 
arranged  and  labelled,  and  the  bits  of  stones  and  ore  looked 
as  though  they  might  have  been  broken  off  from  the  parent 
substances  by  those  tremendously  hard  instruments,  their 
own  names." 

But  it  is  only  in  the  falsificatory  museums  of  science 
that  things  exist  in  little  cabinets,  or  that  the  butterfly  is 
impaled  on  a  pin  and  ranged  in  a  glass  case  with  other 
Lepidoptera.  In  the  real  universe  it  flutters  alone  amid 
the  flowers.  It  is  full  of  its  own  vivid  life ;  it  does  not 
know  it  has  been  classified.  This  classification  exists  only 
in  some  student's  mind ;    the  truth  is  in  the  fluttering 


120  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

butterfly.  And  Truth  really  flutters  like  a  butterfly, 
free  aud  joyous,  winged  with  iridescent  splendours  and 
subtle  shades.  Truth  is  not  a  dead  formula,  but  an 
airy  aliveness. 

When  I  was  a  youth  studying  mathematics  and  the 
'ologies  I  became  infected  with  the  sense  of  superiority  to 
the  crowd  which  these  pursuits  bring  :  such  cold,  logical 
reasoning,  such  rare  reaches  of  thought !  To  think  that 
men  eminent  in  these  branches  should  remain  unrewarded 
by  popular  fame,  while  every  petty  scribbler  with  a  gift 
of  invention  commanded  the  applause  of  the  mob  !  To  be 
a  novelist  seemed  a  paltry  affair  ;  yet  later  on  I  came  to 
recognise  that  the  crowd  is  right,  and  that  those  who 
decry  the  predominance  of  the  novel  are  wrong.  All  these 
sciences  and  speculations  deal  with  human  life,  not  in  its 
living  fulness,  but  with  an  abstractness  which  makes  it 
dead,  unreal,  false.  The  world's  instinctive  distrust  of 
pedants  and  students  and  mathematicians  is  justified. 
They  isolate  one  aspect  of  life,  one  thread  of  the  tangled 
skein,  one  motif  in  the  eternal  symphony,  and  sometimes 
drawing  from  reality  the  merest  shred  of  tune,  execute 
upon  it  an  enormous  fantasia  —  as  in  the  higher  mathe- 
matics —  which  plays  itself  out  inaudibly  in  vacuo.  The 
cold  perfection  of  mathematics  is  due  to  our  having  elimi- 
nated in  advance  all  the  accidents  of  reality,  and  even  the 
supposed  infallibility  of  the  proposition  that  two  and  two 
are  four  shatters  itself  upon  the  futility  of  adding  two 
elephants  to  two  speeches  on  the  Irish  question.  And 
yet  in  those  callow  days  it  was  to  Number  that  I,  like 
Pythagoras,  was  fain  to  look  for  the  key  of  the  riddle. 
But  that  was  under  the  glittering  spell  of  the  late  Mon- 
sieur Taine,  who  well-nigh  persuaded  me  that  a  Science 
was  only  truly  Scientific  when  it  passed  from  the  qualita- 
tive to  the  quantitative  stage.  If  you  could  only  express 
everything  by  mathematical  formuUe,  then  at  last  you 
would  catch  that  shy  bird.  Truth,  by  the  tail.     Strip  away 


OF  FACTS  WITHOUT  AUTOCOSMS  121 

Truth's  feathers,  then  the  flesh,  then  even  the  bones,  till 
you  get  a  meaningless  world  of  imaginary  atoms,  and  that, 
forsooth,  is  the  ultimate  Truth.  "  The  universe,"  said 
Taine  triumphantly,  "  will  one  day  be  expressed  in  math- 
ematical formuhe."  In  other  words,  strip  away  all  there 
is  to  know,  get  rid  of  all  that  interests  you,  the  colour  and 
the  form  and  the  glow  of  life,  and  then  jou.  will  really 
know  the  thing.  The  only  way  to  know  a  thing  is  elabo- 
rately to  prevent  yourself  from  knowing  it. 

That  invaluable  institution  the  Post  Office  annually 
provides  us  with  statistics.  So  many  billion  letters  are 
sent  a  year,  so  many  postcards,  so  many  packages,  and  of 
these  so  many  are  left  open,  and  so  many  unaddressed  or 
unstamped,  and  so  many  go  astray.  These  figures  have 
as  much  to  do  with  the  realities  implied  in  this  corre- 
spondence as  the  figures  of  the  quantitative  sciences  with 
the  realities  they  are  drawn  from.  Even  could  it  be 
proved  that  the  ratio  of  unaddressed  letters  to  addressed 
is  constant  over  a  given  area,  or  that  the  percentage  of 
postcards  varies  inversely  with  the  status  of  the  senders, 
how  much  nearer  are  we  to  the  hot  passions  and  wild 
despairs,  the  commercial  greeds  and  the  loving  humours 
which  are  the  actuality  of  the  phenomena  under  calcula- 
tion ? 

Even  the  lines  and  angles  of  geometry,  which  have 
more  body  than  statistics,  are  a  poor  substitute  for  the 
full,  rich  world,  with  its  forests  and  skies.  Mathematics 
may  be  indispensable  to  navigation,  but  on  the  sea  of  life 
we  sail  very  well  without  it.  Some  of  the  most  charming 
women  I  know  count  on  their  fingers.     When 

"  A  Rosalind  face  at  the  lattice  shows  .  .  . 
And  Sir  Romeo  sticks  in  his  ear  a  rose," 

it  is  indifferent  to  the  situation  that  the  rose  is  compact 
of  chemical  atoms  dancing  in  complex  figures,  setting  to 
partners,  visiting  and  retreating. 


122  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

Biroii  in  "  Love's  Labour  Lost,"  professing  to  derive 
his  learning  from  women's  eyes,  which  are 

"  the  ground,  the  books,  the  academes. 
From  whence  doth  spring  the  true  Promethean  fire," 

was,  though  the  sentiment  may  be  unpopuhir  in  this  edu- 
cational age,  wiser  than  Faust  in  his  study  soliloquising 
on  the  curse  of  useless  learning.  Many  of  the  statements 
of  science  are  true  for  the  abstract  logical  f acult}^ ;  they 
are  not  actually  conceivable.  We  laugh  at  the  mediaeval 
controversies  as  to  how  many  angels  could  dance  on  the 
point  of  a  needle,  but  surely  our  modern  theory  of  the 
atomic  constitution  of  the  needle-point  justifies  the  ques- 
tion. One  angel  per  atom  would  exhaust  the  angelic 
hosts.  Perhaps  the  sparks  emitted  for  years  by  one  drop 
of  bromide  of  radium  on  the  point  of  a  needle  are  really  a 
dance  of  demons.  Or  take  the  undulatory  theory  of  light 
—  that  to  produce  the  varying  colours  of  the  spectrum  the 
luminiferous  ether  must  vibrate  from  458  to  727  million 
of  million  times  per  second.  It  might  as  well  have  been 
a  thousand  billions  or  ten  trillions  for  all  the  difference  to 
our  understanding.  To  give  us  such  figures  is  like  offer- 
ing a  million-pound  note  to  an  omnibus  conductor  and 
expecting  change.  The  best  scientists  admit  these  concep- 
tions are  but  working  hypotheses.  Nay,  I  find  a  worthy 
German  actually  calling  them  "  useful  fictions."  Indeed, 
they  cannot  endure  cross-examination,  and  if  you  want 
to  see  a  scientific  man  as  angry  as  a  theologian  of  the 
Inquisition  era,  you  will  treat  his  mystic  conceptions  as 
Tom  Paine  treated  the  mysteries  of  religion.  The  world 
went  very  well  ere  we  knew  the  fairy-tales  of  science  and 
learned  to  dread  death  in  every  breath  we  took,  every 
crumb  we  ate,  every  drop  of  non-alcoholic  drink  we  drank. 
As  if  it  were  not  tragic  enough  to  read  the  newspapers, 
we  are  harassed  with  the  life-histories  of  insects  invisible 
to  the  naked  eye,  thirty  generations  or  so  of  which  live 


OF   FACTS  WITHOUT  AUTOCOSMS  123 

and  die  every  day  in  a  drop  of  ditch-water.  At  the  same 
time  such  surface  questions  as  why  a  man  lives  six  times 
as  long  as  a  dog  and  a  tortoise  six  times  as  long  as  a  man 
are  left  in  absolute  darkness. 

Men  of  science  are  to  be  admired  for  their  patient  and 
fearless  groping  after  knowledge,  the  only  reward  of  which 
is  the  applause  of  that  splendid  international  brotherhood 
of  learning.  But  this  knowledge  of  theirs  is  never  more 
than  raw  material  for  the  philosopher  at  the  centre  to 
weave  into  his  synopsis.  No  doubt  there  are  men  of 
science  who  preserve  their  perspective,  who  do  not  view 
the  universe  as  heaven-sent  material  for  a  series  of  text- 
books, but  this  part  of  their  thinking  is  done,  not  as  scien- 
tists, but  as  poets  or  philosophers.  Classification  is  all  that 
Science  Proper  can  do,  and  when  the  pigeon-holing  is  com- 
plete to  the  last  Z,  the  universe  will  remain  as  mysterious 
as  before.  When  the  astronomers  have  determined  the 
size,  weight,  orbit,  speed,  and  spectrum  lines  of  all  the  four 
hundred  millions  of  visible  stars,  we  shall  still  look  up 
and  say, 

"  Twinkle,  twinkle,  little  star, 
How  I  wonder  what  you  are !  " 

But  this  pigeon-holing  of  the  universe  by  Science  is  con- 
spicuously zwcomplete.  For  by  a  paradoxical  modesty  the 
man  of  science  too  often  forgets  to  include  himself  in  the 
inventory. 

In  this  way  Herbert  Spencer  explained  everything  — 
except  Herbert  Spencer.  Possibly  the  forgetfulness  is 
wilful,  because  the  existence  of  the  man  of  science  upsets 
so  many  of  his  explanations.  "  I  find  in  the  Universe  no 
trace  of  Will  or  Reason,"  protested  one  of  them  to  me. 
"  I  see  only  the  blind  movement  of  forces,  mechanical  as 
billiard-balls."  "Naturally,"  I  retorted,  "if  you  omit  to 
look  in  the  one  direction  where  Reason  and  Will  assuredly 
exist  —  in  your  own  self." 

On  the  physical  plane  we  get  movement  without  will, 


124  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

on  the  animal  plane  the  will  to  live,  on  the  human  plane 
the  will  to  live  divinely.  These  three  strata  cannot  be 
reduced,  to  a  lowest  common  denominator  of  blind  force. 
And  if  they  could,  the  miracle  of  their  differentiation  would 
still  remain.  That  blind  forces  should  rise  to  conscious- 
ness and  write  books  about  themselves  is  even  more 
wonderful  than  an  eternity  of  spirit.  Reduce  all  the 
seventy  odd  elements  to  one,  as  Chemistry  hopes,  and  in- 
stead of  an  explanation  you  will  only  get  the  new  puzzle 
of  how  the  one  could  contain  the  seeds  of  the  many. 
Even  the  popular  Evolution  theory  is  but  a  juggling  with 
time.  You  do  not  get  rid  of  Creation  by  shifting  the 
beginning  back  to  a  billion  years  last  Tuesday. 

And  with  all  my  admiration  for  the  fine  qualities  of  the 
man  of  science  I  cannot  away  with  his  cocksureness,  so 
curiously  proof  against  the  fact  that  scientific  conceptions 
are  always  changing  —  witness  the  revolution  wrought 
b}'^  radium.  Even  such  a  simple  analysis  as  the  composi- 
tion of  air  has  taken  in  many  new  and  important  constitu- 
ents —  argon,  xenon,  helium,  krypton,  neon,  &c.  —  since 
the  days  when  as  a  schoolboy  I  got  full  marks  for  stating 
them  inaccurately.  And  yet  to  this  day  the  scientist  re- 
counting the  constituents  of  air  forgets  to  wind  up,  "  With 
power  to  add  to  their  number." 

As  for  those  sciences  which  do  not  depend  on  intellectual 
conceptions  and  practical  experiments,  but  on  antiquarian 
research,  those  learned  and  dry-as-dust  studies  which 
academies  delight  to  honour,  they  owe  all  their  importance 
simply  to  antiquity's  lack  of  self-consciousness  and  its 
failure  to  provide  for  the  curiosity  of  posterity.  Had  the 
first  man  who  evolved  from  the  ape  drawn  up  a  note  upon 
his  ancestor,  or,  better  still,  made  a  picture  of  his  ancestral 
tree,  what  controversies  we  should  have  been  spared  !  Had 
the  builders  of  the  Pyramids  or  the  delvers  of  the  Roman 
catacombs  put  up  little  tablets  to  explain  their  ideas,  what 
scholarship  would  have  been  nipped  in  the  bud  !     The 


OF   FACTS  WITHOUT  AUTOCOSMS  125 

reputation  of  the  Egyptologists  depends  on  the  fact  that 
the  writers  of  hieroglyphics  apparently  left  no  dictionary. 
If  one  were  to  turn  up,  the  reputation  of  these  savants 
would  be  gone.  At  present  they  are  able  to  translate  the 
same  text  by  "  The  King  went  a-hunting  "  or  "  My  grand- 
mother is  dead  "  without  ceasing  to  be  taken  seriously. 

But  it  is  in  the  realm  of  Italian  art-connoisseurship  that 
the  greatest  havoc  would  be  wrought  did  an  official  cata- 
logue come  to  light,  say  in  one  of  the  recesses  of  the  Vati- 
can or  in  that  wilderness  of  the  Venetian  archives.  For 
the  lordly  neglect  of  the  Old  Masters  to  put  their  names 
to  their  pictures  has  flooded  us  with  a  tedious  pedantry  of 
rival  attributions,  and  the  thing  of  beauty,  instead  of  be- 
ing a  joy  for  ever,  is  an  eternal  source  of  dulness. 

"  Ass  who  attributes  it  to  Mantegna,"  I  saw  scribbled 
on  a  fresco,  at  Padua,  of  St.  Antony  admonishing  Ezze- 
lino,  and  connoisseurship  is  merely  politer.  As  long  ago 
as  1527  a  quiz  or  a  braggart  of  an  artist,  Zacchia  da  Vezzano, 
painted  underneath  a  sacred  picture  of  his,  now  in  Lucca : 

"  His  operis  visis  hujus  cognoscere  quis  sit 
Auctorem  dempto  nomine  quisque  potest." 

As  who  should  say,  "  Take  away  the  name  and  anybody  can 
tell  the  artist."     But  experience  proves  the  contrary. 

I  do  not  say  that  the  virtuosi  would  all  be  exposed,  as 
by  the  pedigree  of  a  Da  Vinci  bust,  could  we  light  on  a 
source  of  certainty  like  the  contemporary  slatings  in  the 
Renaissance  Review.  Some  of  these  sleuth-hounds  might 
even  be  vindicated ;  and  I  opine  that  to  you,  aynico  mio, 
who  of  thirty-three  Titians  in  a  London  exhibition  pro- 
nounced no  less  than  thirty-two  to  be  hung  on  false  evi- 
dence, the  discovery  of  a  set  of  Accademia  catalogues  would 
not  be  unwelcome.  But  your  career  as  a  connoisseur  would 
close.  Dead  too  would  be  the  school  of  Morelli,  collapsed 
the  draper}'  students  and  ear-measurers,  whose  mathemat- 
ics had,  indeed,  as  little  relation  to  Art  as  it  has  to  life. 


126  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

The  Sherlock  Ilolmeses  of  Science  and  Art  dig  up  old 
cities,  reconstruct  forgotten  civilisations,  redistribute  fa- 
mous pictures,  and  amend  corrupt  texts  or  corrupt  them 
more  hopelessly.  It  is  but  rarely  that  they  have  imagina- 
tive and  historic  insight.  "  Learning  is  but  an  adjunct  to 
ourselves,"  says  Biron.  Scholars  are  too  often  but  an 
adjunct  to  learning.  For  men  with  real  insight  there  are 
enough  dead  civilisations  and  forgotten  customs  still  flour- 
ishing all  about  us.  The  taboo,  the  fetish,  the  totem,  the 
oracle  and  the  myth  are  the  very  atmosphere  of  our  being. 

Our  generation  will  leave  newspapers  and  museums  — 
nay,  gramophone  records  and  the  films  of  bioscopes ;  the 
ghosts  of  our  shapes  and  voices  will  haunt  our  posterity, 
and  the  only  chance  for  scholars  will  be  to  condense  the 
too,  too  ample  materials  —  there  are  four  miles  of  novels 
already  in  the  British  Museum  —  or  perhaps  a  few  benefi- 
cent fires  will  give  scholarship  a  new  lease  of  life.  At 
their  best  and  richest  antiquarian  studies  only  help  to  make 
the  past  present  again,  but  how  does  that  help  us  in  essen- 
tial insight  ?  The  past  of  to-morrow  is  here  to-day  and 
we  are  no  wiser.  In  the  hundredth  century  the  excavator 
may  exhume  London,  but  we  see  London  even  more  clearly 
to-day,  and  how  does  that  help  us  in  the  real  problems  ? 

No  ;  the  only  help  for  us  lies  in  those  elements  of  Truth 
which  we  draw  from  ourselves,  not  receive  from  without 
—  in  those  emotional  and  volitional  contacts  with  the  es- 
sence of  things  which  accompany  all  intellectual  percep- 
tion ;  in  these  motor  aspects  of  reality  which  drive  us 
along,  these  flashes  of  faith  and  spiritual  intuition  which, 
although  they  may  vary  from  age  to  age  under  the  spell 
of  individual  poets  and  prophets,  and  under  the  evolution 
of  knowledge  and  civilisation, 

"  Are  yet  a  master-light  of  all  our  seeing." 

They  may  have  been  intertwined  with  incorrect  intellec- 
tual elements,  but  because  one  antenna  of  the  apparatus  of 


OF  FACTS  WITHOUT  AUTOCOSMS  127 

consciousness  functions  falsely  we  are  not  therefore  justified 
in  wholly  rejecting  the  joint  report.  When  we  think  of 
the  vast  number  of  contradictory  truths  by  which  men  in 
all  ages  and  countries  have  lived  and  died,  we  shall  find 
consolation  in  the  thought  that  the  emotional  and  voli- 
tional elements  of  Truth  are  more  important  than  its  in- 
tellectual skeleton. 

But  what  a  curious  confusion  that  these  emotional  and 
volitional  elements  should  themselves  come  to  be  treated 
as  intellectual,  and  desiccated  into  dogmas  !  This  is  the 
result  of  their  seeking  expression  in  words,  that  unsuit- 
able, impossible  and  fading  medium.  It  is  through  their 
felicitous  escape  from  words  that  verbally  inarticulate 
artists  and  musicians  paint  and  compose  truer  things  than 
philosophers  say,  things  that  survive  vicissitudes  of 
thought  and  are  as  true  to-morrow  as  yesterday.  With 
the  music  of  the  Roman  Catholic  Church  we  all  agree,  and 
who  shall  contradict  the  Venus  of  Milo  ? 

Yes,  a  statue  or  a  symphony  is  safe  from  syllogisms,  at 
least  until  it  gets  into  the  hands  of  the  art  critic  and  the 
programme-concoctor.  But  the  truth  airily  embodied  in 
words  is  at  the  mercy  of  system-builders  and  deduction- 
squeezers.  Taken  with  the  hard  definiteness  of  coins  — 
as  if,  indeed,  even  coins  did  not  vary  from  day  to  day  in 
purchasing  power  and  according  to  the  country  of  circula- 
tion, —  the  words  are  added  together  to  yield  a  specific 
sum  of  truth.  Flying  prophetic  phrases  and  winged 
mystical  raptures  are  shot  down  and  stuffed  for  Church 
Catechisms  and  Athanasian  Creeds.  As  if  the  emotional 
and  volitional  fringe  of  living  words  permitted  them  to  be 
thus  sterilised  into  scientific  propositions  !  For  just  as 
facts  are  the  skeletons  of  truths,  so  words  are  single  bones, 
and  the  dictionary  is  a  vast  ossuary.  Talk  of  the  dead 
languages  —  all  languages  are  dead  unless  spoken,  and 
spoken  with  real  feeling.  A  parrot  always  speaks  a  dead 
language.    It  is  the  folly  of  a  universal  language  that  it  as- 


128  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

sumes  the  same  vocabulaiy  could  be  used  over  a  vast  area  of 
varying  conditions,  its  words  never  expanding  nor  contract- 
ing in  meaning,  nor  ever  changing  in  pronunciation  or  col- 
our. As  if  Latin  was  not  once  universal  in  those  countries 
which  have  gradually  transformed  it  into  French,  Spanish, 
Portuguese,  Italian,  Provencal,  Roumanian,  and  Rumonsch  I 
Idiomatic  expressions  cannot  be  torn  from  the  soil  they 
grow  in.  Maiiana  has  not  the  same  meaning  outside  Spain 
nor  Kismet  outside  Islam.  Language  lays  such  traps  for 
fools  ;  the  fools  have  always  spoiled  and  fossilised  what 
the  men  of  genius  have  felt  and  thought.  They  have 
made  logic  out  of  poetry  and  have  deadened  worship  and 
wonder  into  theology.  "  What  do  you  read  ? "  says 
Hamlet.     "Words,  words,  words." 

A  truth,  then,  may  be  formulated,  but  it  is  not  true  till 
it  is  felt  and  acted  on,  and  ceases  to  be  true  when  it  ceases 
to  be  felt  and  acted  on.  Nor  does  this  canon  apply  only 
to  inner  truths.  Without  an  element  of  feeling  and  voli- 
tion, however  shadowy,  even  the  simple  realities  of  the 
outer  world  have  never  been  perceived,  and  the  omission 
of  these  elements  invalidates  the  total  reality.  If 
so  many  readers  skip  scenery  in  novels,  'tis  because  the 
scene  is  described  as  though  it  existed  in  itself.  The 
dead  chunk  of  landscape  bores  and  depresses.  The 
reader  subconsciously  feels  that  so  impersonal  a  vision  is 
untrue  to  the  actualities  of  perception.  Nobody  has  ever 
seen  a  landscape  without  some  emotion,  if  only  the  travel- 
ler's desire  to  be  at  the  other  end  of  it.  A  dozen  persons 
—  even  omitting  the  colour-blind  —  would  see  it  in  as 
many  different  ways,  each  with  different  accompaniments 
of  feeling,  thought,  and  volition,  potential  or  actual,  just  as 
every  person  in  "  The  Ring  and  the  Book  "  sees  Pompilia 
differently.  Let  the  novelist  describe  the  scene,  not  for 
itself,  but  for  its  relation  to  the  emotions  and  purposes  of 
his  personages,  and  it  leaps  into  life.  Similar  is  the  case 
of  Science,  whose   facts   in   divesting   themselves   of  all 


OF  FACTS   WITHOUT   AUTOCOSMS  129 

emotion  and  individual  error  divest  themselves  likewise 
of  reality.  The  dry  scientific  coldness  with  which  the 
universe  must  be  envisaged  is  an  artificial  method  of 
vision.  True,  the  scientist  himself  may  be  impelled  by 
the  most  tingling  curiosity.  But  the  passion  and  thrill  of 
his  chase  for  truth  does  not  appear  in  the  quarry  :  that  is 
a  mere  carcase.  His  report  on  his  specialty  is  always 
carefully  divested  of  emotion.  But  our  emotional  and 
volitional  relations  to  the  spectacle  of  existence  are  as 
much  a  part  of  the  total  truth  of  things  as  colour  is  of  the 
visible  world.     The  world  is  not  complete  without 

"  The  light  that  never  was  on  sea  or  land, 
The  consecration  and  the  poet's  dream." 

When  Lear  cries  to  the  heavens  that  they  too  are  old,  or 
Lamartine  calls  on  the  lake  to  remember  his  happiness, 
Ruskin  would  tell  us  that  this  suffusion  of  Nature  with 
our  own  emotions  is  the  pathetic  fallacy.  On  the  con- 
trary, its  absence  is  the  scientific  fallacy.  Science  registers 
the  world  as  the  phonograph  registers  sound  or  the  camera 
space  —  without  any  emotion  of  its  own.  As  the  former 
with  equal  phlegm  records  a  song  or  a  curse,  or  the  latter 
a  wedding  or  a  funeral,  so  does  Science  register  its  impas- 
sive observations.  For  once  admit  such  a  shifting  subjec- 
tive factor  as  emotion,  and  what  becomes  of  the  glorious 
objectivity  of  Science  ?  Away,  therefore,  with  all  but  the 
frigid  intellectual  view  of  things  !  Since  the  otlier  ele- 
ments of  Truth  elude  our  grasp,  let  us  boldly  declare  them 
irrelevant.  The  bankruptcy  of  Science,  you  see,  comes 
not  at  the  end  of  its  operations.  Science  starts  bankrupt. 
It  has  not  sufficient  capital  to  begin  trading.  Its  methods 
and  apparatus  are  entirely  inadequate  for  the  attainment 
of  truth.  A  cat  may  look  at  a  king  —  but  its  observation 
will  not  be  very  profound.  And  Science  is  as  little 
equipped  for  observing  the  universe  as  the  cat  for  observ- 
ing the  king.     All  it  can  perceive  or  establish  is  chains  of 


130  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

causation,  or  rather  recurring  sequences  of  phenomena,  in 
an  unconscious  continuian.  It  is  a  post-mortem  investiga- 
tion to  ascertain,  not  the  cause  of  death,  but  the  cause  of 
life. 

But  the  universe  is  not  a  quaint  collection  of  dead  things 
in  a  vacuum,  not  a  museum  of  stuffed  birds  or  transfixed 
butterflies,  but  a  breathing,  flying,  singing,  striving  and 
suffering  process  —  an  unfinished  infinitude.  This  kinetic 
process  cannot  be  expressed  in  terms  of  statics.  "  What 
is  Truth  ?  "  says  the  jesting  cosmos,  and  does  not  stay  for 
an  answer.  But  by  an  artificial  abstraction  parts  of  it  can 
be  expressed  for  the  intellect  in  static  'ologies  and  'onomies, 
on  the  understanding  that  the  intellect  never  forgets  to 
put  back  its  results  into  the  palpitating  flux  to  which 
they  belong  and  in  which  alone  they  have  true  significance. 
This  understanding  the  intellect  too  frequently  violates 
or  forgets,  and  therefore  for  Truth  we  must  go,  not  to  the 
man  of  science,  but  to  the  poet,  who  registers  his  universe 
synthetically  with  soul  as  well  as  with  brain.  Tragedy, 
comedy,  heroic  drama,  sombre  suffering,  majestic  mystery 
— ■  all  these  are  in  the  flux  —  more  surely  than  ether  waves 
and  dancing  atoms  —  and  the  poet  in  painting  the  fulness 
of  life  with  the  fulness  of  his  own  emotion  is  giving  us  a 
fuller  truth  than  any  that  Science  can  attain  to.  "  We 
cannot  really  know  the  truth  unless  we  love  the  truth," 
said  Fenelon.  "They  who  love  well  will  know  well." 
This  is  not  mysticism  but  common  sense,  and  Goethe  re- 
peated it  when  he  said  that  "  No  one  can  write  about  any- 
thing unless  he  writes  about  it  with  love."  "  To  see  things 
in  their  beauty,"  said  Matthew  Arnold,  "  is  to  see  them  in 
their  truth."  It  may  be  that  the  knowledge  of  things 
through  pure  intellect  is  pure  delusion,  that  to  pigeon-hole 
the  universe  is  to  make  it  into  a  cemetery.  Instead  of 
that  "  love  is  blind,"  the  truth  may  be  that  only  love  sees. 
There  is  a  sense  in  which  every  mother's  babe  is  the  most 
beautiful  in  the  world. 


OF   FACTS  WITHOUT  AUTOCOSMS  131 

Knowledge,  then,  as  a  mere  function  of  the  intellect,  is 
only  the  dead  knowledge  that  appears  in  school-books. 
But  who  shall  say  that  knowledge  was  meant  to  be  only  a 
function  of  the  intellect,  that  we  do  not  know  with  our 
heart  and  soul  as  well  as  with  our  brains  ?  Nay,  as  if  to 
mock  at  mere  intellect,  the  universe  absolutely  refuses  to 
yield  up  its  secret  to  the  intellect.  Hence  the  antinomies 
of  Kant  or  Mansel  or  Plato's  "  Parmenides."  Follow  up 
mere  thought,  however  apparently  clear,  and  it  lands  us 
in  nonsense.  Perhaps  wisdom  does  not  lie  that  way  at 
all.  Perhaps  the  fear  of  the  Lord  is  really  the  beginning 
of  wisdom. 

For  if  Science  is  Truth  in  one  dimension  and  Art  Truth 
in  two  dimensions,  it  is  only  when  we  complete  emotional 
vision  by  volition  that  we  arrive  at  Truth's  full-orbed 
reality.  Even  love  cannot  bring  wisdom  unless  the  love 
translates  itself  into  action.  In  short,  the  meaning  of 
Truth  must  be  changed  from  a  dead  fact  of  the  intellect 
into  a  live  fact  of  the  whole  being.  The  Truth  is  also  the 
Way  and  the  Life. 

Aristotle  in  his  "  Metaphysics "  tells  us  that  Cratylus 
carried  the  scepticism  of  Heraclitus  to  such  a  degree  that 
he  at  last  was  of  opinion  one  ought  to  speak  of  nothing,  but 
merely  moved  his  finger.  Aristotle  does  not  see  that  in 
this  moving  of  his  finger  Cratylus  was  asserting  at  least 
the  volitional  element  of  Truth  and  perhaps  its  most  im- 
portant. For  the  universe  is  not  a  museum,  placarded 
"Look,  but  please  do  not  touch."  It  says,  "Touch,  and 
then  you  will  really  see.  Live,  work,  love,  fight,  and 
then  you  will  really  know  what  the  nature  of  your  universe 
is." 

The  world  of  the  physical  sciences  is  only  the  stage-set- 
ting for  the  spiritual  drama.  Though  there  is  a  truth  of 
dead  things  called  Science,  the  real  truth  is  of  live  things 
—  a  triple  truth  in  which  intellect,  will,  and  emotion  are 
one.     Our  sense  of  this  truth  —  obtained  as  it  is  during 


132  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

emotional  volition  —  is  individual,  irreducible  to  the 
simpler  planes  of  Science  and  Art,  and  thus  incommuni- 
cable. And  the  measure  of  our  attainment  of  it  will  be 
the  measure  of  our  sympathetic  insight  and  of  the  depth 
to  which  we  have  penetrated  by  action  into  the  heart  of 
the  phenomena.  Then  what  seemed  a  mass  of  dull  facts 
may  break  into  music  like  a  Beethoven  score  under  the 
baton  of  a  master. 

The  scientist  who  should  say  that  a  Beethoven  symphony 
consisted  of  the  atoms  of  the  paper  and  ink  which  con- 
stitute the  score,  or  even  who  expressed  it  mathematically 
as  a  sequence  of  complex  air-vibrations  made  by  strings 
and  holes,  would  be  talking  truth;  but  as  incomplete  and 
irrelevant  truth  as  the  ignoramus  who  should  say  it  was 
curious  black  strokes  and  dots  on  ruled  paper,  or  the 
statistician  who  should  count  the  semi-breves  or  fortissimo 
passages.  The  true  truth  of  the  symphony  comes  into 
being  only  when  it  is  interpreted  by  the  finest  performers 
to  souls  whose  life  it  enlarges. 

And  so  with  the  universe,  which  is  not  a  dead,  complete 
thing  outside  of  us,  but  a  palpitating  spiritual  potentiality, 
for  the  fullest  truth  about  which  the  co-operation  of  our  own 
souls  is  needed,  our  souls  that  create  a  part  of  the  truth 
they  perceive  or  aspire  to.  The  universe,  in  short,  is  a 
magic  storehouse  from  which  we  may  draw  —  or  into 
which  put  —  what  we  will  to  the  extent  of  our  faith,  our 
emotion,  our  sense  of  beauty,  our  righteousness.  "  Ask, 
and  it  shall  be  given  you  ;  seek,  and  ye  shall  find  ;  knock, 
and  it  shall  be  opened  unto  you." 


OF  FACTS  WITH   ALIEN   AUTOCOSMS:    OR 
THE   FUTILITY   OF   CULTURE 

When  I  betake  me  to  a  zoological  garden,  equipped 
with  a  pennyworth  of  popcorn,  a  food  strangely  popular 
even  among  the  carnivora,  I  am  touched  by  a  prescience 
of  all  the  pleasure  and  dumb  gratitude  to  be  evoked  by 
those  humble  grains.  And  in  truth  how  many  eager  caged 
creatures  are  destined  to  have  a  joyous  thrill  of  sniffing 
suspense,  followed  by  the  due  titillation  of  the  palate! 
My  proffering  fingers  shall  meet  the  gentle  nose  of  the 
deer,  the  sensitive  arching  trunk  of  the  elephant,  the  kindly 
peck  of  parrots,  the  mischievous  hands  of  monkeys,  the 
soft  snouts  of  strange  beasts.  Not  otherwise  is  it  when, 
faring  forth  to  Italy,  I  provision  myself  with  a  bag  of  coin. 
Into  what  innumerable  itching  tentacles  these  gilded  or 
cuprous  grains  are  to  drop  :  white-cuffed  hands  of  waiters, 
horny  digits  of  vetturini  and  facchini,  gnarled  fins  of  gondo- 
liers and  hookers,  grimy  paws  of  beggars,  shrivelled  stumps 
of  cripples,  dexterous  toes  of  armless  ancients,  spluttering 
mouths  of  divers,  rosy  fingers  of  flower-throwing  chil- 
dren, persuasive  plates  of  serenading  musicians,  deceptive 
ticket-holes  of  dishonest  railway  clerks,  plethoric  pockets 
of  hotel-keepers,  greedy  tills  of  bargaining  shopkeepers, 
pious  palms  of  monks  and  sacristans,  charity-boxes  of 
cathedrals,  long-handled  fishing-nets  of  little  churches, 
musty  laps  of  squatting,  mumbling  crones,  greasy  caps  of 
guides,  official  pyxes  of  curators  and  janitors,  clutching 
claws  of  unbidden  cicerones.  All  these  —  and  how  many 
more! — photographers   and    painters    and   copyists   and 

133 


134  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

forg^ers,  modellers  and  restorers  and  lecturers  on  ruins, 
landlords  and  cooks  and  critics — live  by  Italy's  ancient 
art.     Great  Caesar  dead  —  and  turned  to  Show. 

The  beauty  of  Italy  is  elemental  fodder  for  the  autoch- 
thones ;  yet  how  strange  the  existence  of  the  Neapolitan 
swimmer  whose  metier  is  to  dive  for  coppers  when  the 
steamer  sails  for  the  witching  cliffs  of  Sorrento,  and  to 
cry  in  enticing  gurgles,  "  Money  in  the  water  !  "  the 
spluttering  syllables  flowing  into  one  another  as  in  the 
soft  patois  of  Venice  !  Precisely  when  the  Bay  of  Naples 
is  a  violet  dancing  flame  and  Vesuvius,  majestically 
couchant,  sends  her  white  incense  to  the  blue,  and  you 
are  tranced  with  beauty  and  sunshine,  comes  this  monetary 
merman  to  drag  you  down  to  the  depths. 

"Nutritive  chains"  the  biologists  name  the  inter-related 
organisms  whose  existence  depends  on  one  another,  and 
another  link  of  this  chain  you  shall  count  the  boatmen 
waiting  to  show  you  the  blue  grotto  of  Capri.  Their  skiffs 
dart  upon  you  like  creatures  whose  prey  comes  only  at 
a  fixed  hour;  like  creatures,  moreover,  shaped  in  the 
struggle  for  existence  to  the  only  function  by  which 
they  can  survive,  for  they  are  fittest  to  pass  under  the 
low  arch  of  the  cerulean  grotto  (the  occupant  consenting 
to  crouch  like  an  antenna  drawn  in).  That  ardent 
water  in  the  Capri  cave  —  that  lovely  flame  of  light  blue 
in  a  bluer  burning  spirit  —  sustains  likewise  the  naked 
diver  who  stands  poised  on  a  rock,  ready  to  show  its 
chromatic  effects  upon  flesh ;  the  culminating  moment 
of  whose  day  —  the  feeding- time,  as  it  were  —  comes 
when  the  tourists  glide  in. 

Apt  symbol  indeed  of  the  tourist,  that  shallow  skiff 
skinnning  over  beauty  with  which  the  native  is  in  deep 
elemental  contact,  from  which,  indeed,  he  wrests  his 
living. 

Since  Goethe  with  his  gospel  of  culture  spent  those 
famous  Wanderjahre  in  Italy,  a  swollen  stream  of  pious 


OF  FACTS  WITH  ALIEN  AUTOCOSMS       135 

art-pilgrims  has  been  pouring  over  the  land.  And 
coming  into  Florence  from  Lucca  and  a  sheaf  of  quiet 
cities  on  an  afternoon  of  this  spring,  I  had  a  horrid  im- 
pression of  modern  bustling  streets  and  motors  and  trams 
and  a  great  press  of  people,  and  ten  thousand  parasites 
battening  on  the  art  and  beauty  of  the  city,  and  it  was 
not  till  I  had  won  my  way  to  my  beloved  Ponte  Vecchio, 
with  its  mediaeval  stalls,  tliat  the  city  of  the  lily  seemed 
to  possess  her  soul  again.  Then  as  I  saw  her  compose 
herself  under  her  deep  blue  sky  into  a  noble  harmony, 
with  her  heights  and  her  palaces  and  her  river  and  her 
arches  and  arcades,  and  group  herself  round  a  tower,  and 
brood  in  Venetian  glamour  over  her  water  with  her 
ancient  rusty  houses,  and  rise  behind  into  a  fantasy  of 
quaint  roofs  and  brick  domes  and  steeples  and  belfries, 
all  floating  in  a  golden  glory ;  and  as  I  reflected  on  all 
she  was  and  held  within  her  narrow  compass,  how  the 
names  of  great  men  and  great  days  were  written  on  every 
stone,  and  how  every  sort  of  art  had  been  poured  over  her 
as  prodigally  as  every  sort  of  earth-beauty ;  and  as  I 
thought  of  the  enchanting  villages  around  and  above  her, 
where  the  cypress  and  the  olive,  the  ilex  and  the  pine 
slumbered  in  the  sunshine,  amid  great  rocks  that  shadowed 
cool  gloomy  pools,  and  white  roads  went  winding  odorous 
with  may  and  sweet  with  the  song  of  thrush  and  black- 
bird, framing  and  arabesquing  the  faery  city  below  in 
magic  tangles  of  leafy  boughs  ;  and  as  I  remembered  that 
here  to-da^^  in  this  same  city  was  not  only  spring,  but  Bot- 
ticelli's Spring  —  then  it  seemed  to  me  that  her  flowers 
and  her  palaces,  her  frescoes  and  the  curves  of  her  hills 
were  pushed  up  from  the  same  deep  elemental  core  of 
beauty,  and  that  she  lay  like  some  great  princess  of 
Brobdingnag  on  whose  body  a  colony  of  all  the  culture- 
snobs  of  the  world  had  dumped  its  masses  of  raw  build- 
ing, run  up  its  hundreds  of  hotels  and  pensions,  piled  its 
pyramids    of    handbooks,    biographies,    Dantes,    histories, 


136  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

essays,  landed  its  hordes  of  guides  and  interpreters, 
encamped  its  army  of  lecturers  and  art  critics,  installed 
its  cohort  of  copyists,  dragged  up  its  heavy  battery  of 
professional  photographers,  supplemented  by  an  amateur 
corps  of  Kodak  snapshooters  ;  but  that,  breathing  lightly 
beneath  all  this  mountainous  cumber,  unasphyxiated  even 
by  the  works  on  the  Renaissance,  she  could  still  rise 
radiant  in  her  immortal  strength  and  beauty,  shaking 
off  the  Lilliputian  creatures  and  their  spawn  of  print, 
ungalled  by  that  ceaseless  fire  of  snapshots,  imperturbable 
amid  the  lecturing,  unimpaired  even  by  all  that  immemo- 
rial admiration. 

The  pioneers  of  this  culture-colony  blundered  some- 
times, as  pioneers  will,  and  even  Goethe,  one  notes  with 
malicious  glee,  spent  himself  upon  the  wrong  pictures, 
gloating  over  Guercino,  wrestling  with  Carracci,  Guido 
and  Domenichino,  and  passing  Botticelli  by,  nay  taking 
all  Florence  as  an  afternoon  excursion.  And  Pater  him- 
self, the  pontifical  Pater,  though  he  has  the  merit  of  a  Bot- 
ticelli pioneer,  yet  thought  it  necessary  to  apologise  for 
criticising  "  a  second-rate  painter "  :  which  is  as  though 
one  should  apologise  for  discussing  Keats. 

Nor  were  Byron  and  Shelley  more  felicitous  in  their 
admirations.  The  Kunstforscher^  that  Being  usually  made 
in  Germany,  has  been  busy  since  their  day.  Amid  the 
great  movement  of  life,  while  men  have  been  sowing  and 
reaping,  writing  and  painting,  voyaging  and  making  love, 
this  spectacled  creature  has  been  peering  at  pictures  and 
statues,  scientifically  analysing  away  their  authenticity  and 
often  their  charm.  There  is  the  Venus  de'  Medici,  which 
generations  have  raved  over,  which  innumerable  proces- 
sions of  tourists  have  journeyed  to  admire  and  found  ad- 
mirable. The  connoisseurs  have  now  pronounced  her 
"  spurious  and  meretricious,"  and  to-day  nobody  who  re- 
spects himself  would  allow  himself  a  thrill  at  the  sight  of 
her.     Yet  Childe  Harold  cried  ; 


OF  FACTS   WITH   ALIEN   AUTOCOSMS       137 

"  We  gaze  and  turn  away,  and  know  not  where, 
Dazzled  and  drunk  with  beauty,  till  the  heart 
Reels  with  its  fulness." 

I  must  admit  that  after  the  Venus  of  Milo  the  beauty 
of  the  Medici  Venus  does  appear  a  trivial  prettiness.  But 
even  the  Venus  of  Milo  —  though  we  are  still  permitted 
to  admire  her  —  is  "late  and  eclectic." 

The  unhappy  Byron  also  wrote  to  somebody :  "  The 
Venus  is  more  for  admiration  than  for  love.  What 
struck  me  most  was  the  mistress  of  the  Raphael  por- 
trait." Alas !  nobody  believes  now  that  the  picture  has 
anything  to  do  with  La  Fornarina. 

As  for  Shelley,  when  in  1819  he  saw  at  Florence  the 
Medusa  attributed  to  Leonardo  da  Vinci,  he  broke  into 
lyric  raptures, 

"  Its  horror  and  its  beauty  are  divine, 
Upon  its  lips  and  eyelids  seems  to  lie 
Loveliness  like  a  shadow,  &c.  &c. 
^  *  ^  *  * 

'Tis  the  tempestuous  loveliness  of  terror  ; 
For  from  the  serpents  gleams  a  brazen  glare, 
Kindled  by  that  inextricable  eri'or !  .  .  ." 

Kindled  indeed  by  that  inextricable  error !  For  the  Me- 
dusa is  now  given  up  by  every  connoisseur.  It  is  a  mere 
inartistic  futility,  and  to-day  every  lover  of  the  arts  must 
grow  stony  at  the  sight  of  it.  That  immortal  line  "the 
tempestuous  loveliness  of  terror  "  is  the  only  thing  to  its 
credit,  though  some  might  count,  too,  the  passage  in  which 
Pater  gloats  over  its  beauty  of  conception. 

Then  there  is  that  little  matter  of  Leonardo's  St.  John 
in  the  Louvre.  Michelet  saw  the  whole  Renaissance  in  it, 
and  Pater  alludes  to  it  as  "  one  of  the  few  naked  figures 
Leonardo  painted,"  and  builds  upon  it  a  complex  theory 
of  Leonardo's  symbolic  suggestive  method,  and  is  not  sur- 
prised at  the  saint's  "strange  likeness  to  the  Bacchus 
which  hangs  near  it,  which  set  Theophile  Gautier  think- 


138  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

ing  of  Heine's  notion  of  decayed  gods,  who,  to  maintain 
themselves  after  the  fall  of  Paganism,  took  employment 
in  the  new  religion."  And  now  the  St.  John  turns  out  to 
liave  been  a  pupil's  or  an  imitator's,  and  probably  not  even 
a  St.  John. 

The  culture-pilgrims  of  to-day,  armed  with  sacred  text- 
books, verbally  infallible,  and  canonical  lists  of  authentic 
attributions,  enjoy  a  suspicious  superiority  in  aesthetic 
judgment  over  the  greatest  creative  artists.  For  Goethe 
and  Byron  and  Shelley  did  at  least  create,  and  Pater's 
interpretation  of  Mona  Lisa  is  finer  than  the  picture  itself  ; 
whereas  the  pursuit  of  culture  in  the  average  pilgrim  is  a 
confession  of  sterility  either  in  himself  or  in  his  own  na- 
tion, which  is  not  sufficiently  vitalised  to  absorb  his  inter- 
ests. "  If  the  Romans  had  had  to  learn  Latin,"  said  Heine, 
"  they  would  never  have  conquered  the  world."  And  were 
England  free  in  thought  and  nobly  artistic,  there  would 
be  no  need  of  this  fervour  for  the  preservation  of  Greek. 
Even  Goethe,  it  is  amazing  to  discover  from  his  "  Italian- 
ische  Reise,"  never  saw  the  sea  till  he  went  to  Italy.  And 
his  first  glimpse  of  it  was,  of  all  places  in  the  world,  at 
the  Lido  in  Venice !  He  with  the  German  Ocean  to  draw 
from  him,  as  it  drew  from  Heine,  the  cry  of  "  Thalassa  !  "; 
he  who  might  have  seen  how 

"  Die  weissen  Meerkindei- 
Hoch  aufspringen  und  jauchzen 
Uebermut-ber  ausch  t, " 

must  fare  forth  to  another  land  and  behold  a  lazy,  almost 
tideless  lagoon  lapping  in  shallow  muddiness  on  the  tamest 
and  dullest  shore  in  the  world.  Surely  we  have  here  an 
ironic  image  of  the  culture-pilgrim  who  sets  out  to  see 
Art  abroad  before  he  has  seen  Nature  at  home. 

When  the  Goths  besieged  Rome,  Belisarius  hurled  down 
upon  them  the  statues  of  the  Mausoleum  of  St.  Angelo, 
and  the  tomb  was  turned  to  a  citadel.     But  against  the 


OF  FACTS   WITH  ALIEN   AUTOCOSMS       139 

siege  of  Rome  by  the  Goethes  there  is  no  known  defence. 
A  rain  of  statues  would  merely  aggravate  their  zeal,  and 
the  more  hopelessly  the  statues  smashed,  the  more  would 
their  admiration  solidify.  So  to-day  the  Goethes  and  the 
Huns  alike  are  invited  up  to  see  the  statues — for  a  fee — 
and  every  citadel  of  reality  is  turned  to  a  mausoleum- 
museum.  St.  Angelo,  that  has  stood  the  storms  of  eigh- 
teen centuries,  is  the  perquisite  of  a  facetious  warder  who 
gabbles  automatically  of  Beatrice  Cenci,  "?a  piil  hella 
ragazza  c?'  Italia^''''  as  he  points  out  her  pitiful,  if  dubious, 
dungeon.  In  the  stone  cell  of  the  Florentine  monastery, 
on  whose  cold  flags  Savonarola  wore  his  knees  in  fasting 
and  prayer,  a  guide  holds  up  a  reflector  to  concentrate 
the  light  on  the  frescoes  with  which  Fra  Angelico  glorified 
the  rude  walls.  Where  St.  Catherine  walked — in  the 
footsteps  of  the  Bridegroom— leaving  the  marks  of  her 
miraculous  feet,  a  buxom  native  of  Siena  expects  her 
obolus.  Outside  the  pyramid-shadowed  cemetery  where 
Keats  lies  under  his  heart-broken  epitaph,  a  Roman  urchin 
turns  supplicatory  somersaults.  Italia  Bella,  a  paper  pub- 
lished at  Milan,  adjured  Arona  to  wake  up  and  celebrate 
the  tercentenary  of  the  canonisation  of  its  Saint  Carlo, 
"if  only  because  it  pays."  History,  with  its  blood  and 
tears,  becomes  sesthetics  for  the  tourist  and  economics  for 
the  native.  Of  a  truth  quaint  links  concatenate  Csesar 
and  the  showman,  the  saint  with  the  apple-woman  who 
finds  a  profitable  pitch  for  her  stall  at  his  church-corner. 
While  we  are  fuming  and  strutting  we  are  but  providing 
popcorn  for  posterity.  Buskined  heroes  of  history,  who 
walk  the  earth  in  tragic  splendour,  perchance  your  truest 
service  to  humanity  has  been  done  in  affording  occupation 
for  the  poor  devil  who  expatiates  upon  the  traces  of  your 
passing.  This,  at  least,  ye  may  be  sure  is  good  service ; 
the  rest  of  your  work,  who  shall  sever  the  good  and  evil 
strands  of  it?  So  much  pother  of  prophets  and  politicians 
—  and,  lo  !  how  poor  a  planet  we  still  wander  in. 


140  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

The  culture-pilgrim,  too,  apart  from  this  scattering  of 
popcorn,  is  a  futile  being.  Culture  as  a  mere  excursion 
from  a  solid  home-reality  may  be  vitalising,  but  whoso 
thinks  to  batten  on  alien  arts  and  letters  is  filling  his  belly 
with  the  sirocco.  There  is  no  reality  in  the  travel-world, 
be  it  the  world  of  Art  or  the  world  of  Nature,  for  we  have 
no  true  volitional  relations  with  it.  'Twas  Schopenhauer 
who  discovered  this  for  Art — though  his  World  has  only 
the  two  dimensions  of  Will  and  Idea.  But  he  did  not,  if 
I  remember,  point  out  that  everything  seen  with  aloofness 
from  action  partakes  of  this  art-quality.  The  landscape 
from  the  observation-car  is  a  mere  picture  to  us,  however 
real  to  the  peasants  working  in  the  fields. 

The  only  "real"  traveller  is  the  commercial.  We 
others,  wandering  through  streets  that  our  ancestors  did 
not  build,  or  sitting  in  alien  apartments  and  gazing  upon 
unhomely  hills,  are  still  spectators,  not  actors.  We  are 
not  rooted  in  this  soil,  nor  feel  the  deep  intimacies  that 
are  the  truest  truth  about  it.  I  may  partake  in  the 
annual /esto  of  an  Italian  mountain  village,  hear  the  Mass, 
bear  banner  and  taper  in  the  procession,  salute  the  saintly 
image,  dance  upon  the  plateau-piazza  with  a  snooded 
peasant-girl,  but  how  shall  I  feel  the  holiness  and  joy  of  this 
day  of  days  ?  —  I  whose  infant  breath  was  not  drawn  amid 
these  precipitous  fastnesses,  who  have  not  lived  in  these 
human  caves  cut  in  the  rock,  who  have  not  played  in  these 
steep  stone  streets,  who  know  nothing  of  the  dear  narrow- 
ness, the  vivid  intensity  that  is  born  of  cramped  conscious- 
ness I  There  is  in  the  very  attitude  of  spectator  something 
that  stands  between  one  and  the  object  in  its  truth.  This  it 
is  that  makes  the  appreciations  of  cities  by  the  school  of 
Pater  such  hollow  fantasy,  such  bastards  of  an  accident 
by  a  temperament.  This  it  was  that  begot  Pierre  Loti's 
monumental  misreading  of  Japan  as  a  Lilliput  of  the 
pretty-pretty.  To  lose  the  artistic  Ego  in  the  inner  life 
of  the  phenomenon — how  rare  the  critic  who  is  capable  of 


OF   FACTS   WITH   ALIEN  AUTOCOSMS       141 

that !     Listening  to  these  parasites  upon  alien  autocosms, 
"Moving  about  in  worlds  not  realised," 

one  would  imagine  that  a  civilisation  or  a  city  existed, 
that  its  remote  founders  had  fevered,  and  its  burghers 
toiled,  and  its  architects  built,  to  the  mere  end  that  cen- 
turies after  they  were  dust  some  exquisite  vibrations 
should  be  registered  on  a  sensitive  soul. 

Only  less  arrogant  is  it  to  place  one's  soul  in  patronising 
"  appreciation  "  before  some  great  historic  structure  —  a 
cathedral,  a  mosque,  a  palace,  a  library.  These  works  of 
man  so  immensely  transcend  any  man's  works  that  he  fits 
into  them  almost  as  ludicrously  as  a  mouse.  A  cathedral 
that  represents  the  genius  and  labours  and  sacrifices  of 
generations  towers  so  immensely  out  of  proportion  to  any 
individual  that  he  can  only  recover  a  reasonable  relation 
to  it  by  fusing  himself  into  the  life  and  stature  of  the  race. 
To  be  solely  concerned  with  its  impingement  upon  his 
own  soul  is  an  impertinence,  to  pass  his  life  in  contriving 
such  impingements  is  to  live  by  robbery,  and  to  enjoy 
these  secular  products  of  human  solidarity  on  the  Paterian 
pretext  that  the  only  reality  is  the  fleeting  and  isolated 
Ego,  is  peculiarly  paradoxical. 

Pater  himself  would  even  go  so  far  as  to  study  men,  e.g.^ 
Pico  di  Mirandola,  for  their  aesthetic  flavours.  This  is, 
indeed,  to  live  resolutely  Im  Schonen  if  not  Im  Ganzen, 
and  it  is,  therefore,  the  more  curious,  that  in  citing 
Goethe's  maxim  in  his  "  Winckelmann  "  Pater  should,  like 
Carlyle,  have  unconsciously  substituted  Im  Wahren  for  Im 
Schonen.  The  gesthetic  appreciation  of  Pico  —  as  of  most 
things  —  is  a  mere  by-product.  I  do  not  deny  that  by- 
products are  sometimes  delightful.  But  let  us  not  mis- 
take them  for  central  verities.  And  these  churches,  these 
pictures,  these  statues,  these  palaces,  these  monasteries 
which  we  see  to-day  in  two  dimensions,  had  once  their 
third  dimension  of  reality,  nay,'  often  have  it  still  to  those 


142  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

who  know  them  in  their  truth.  How  quaint  that  juxta- 
position of  Bibles  and  Baedekers  in  Italian  churches  I 
The  image  which,  seen  through  tears,  is  soothing  a  wor- 
shipper's pain,  is  at  the  same  moment  finding  exact 
appreciation  at  the  eyes  of  a  connoisseur.  Who  can  read 
without  emotion  of  how  in  thirteenth-century  Florence 
Cimabue's  Madonna,  "  the  first  Madonna  the  people  could 
love,"  was  borne  in  triumph  from  the  painter's  studio  to  its 
church  by  the  whole  population  of  the  quarter,  which 
henceforwards  took  the  name  of  the  Allegro  Borgo!  To- 
day the  art-critic  analyses  its  types  and  its  composition, 
and  it  takes  its  place  coldly  in  the  history  of  painting  as 
the  link  between  the  Byzantine  and  the  Tuscan.  But  the 
citizens  of  the  Joyous  Quarter  had  the  true  flavour  of  the 
thing. 

Despite  the  doctrine  of  Art  for  Art's  sake  it  remains 
questionable  if  any  maker  of  Art  has  ever  escaped  a  desire 
to  act  —  massively  or  diffusively  —  upon  the  life  of  his 
age.  In  vain  he  hides  himself  in  the  past,  or  flies  to  No- 
man's-land,  he  vibrates  throughout  to  the  present,  touches 
living  interests  with  their  myriad  indirect  relations  to 
action,  to  the  third  dimension.  Every  art-product  holds, 
however  subtly,  something  of  that  topical  quality  which 
makes  the  portrait  of  a  contemporary  celebrity,  wet  from 
the  painter's  brush,  very  different  from  the  peaceful  re- 
moteness of  an  old  master. 

No  half-deciphered  face  of  dim  sweetness,  charming  us 
from  the  magic  casement  of  some  fading  fresco  by  some 
forgotten  artist,  as  with  the  very  image  of  Art  aloof  and  ab- 
solute, but  was  once  wrought  for  a  specific  market  and  born 
into  a  specific  atmosphere.  The  forlorn  stumps  and 
torsoes  that  litter  the  moss-grown  courts  of  museums  were 
hailed,  as  they  fell  from  the  craftsman's  hand,  by  a  definite 
clientele,  rejoicing  in  their  beauty,  stimulated  by  their 
freshness.  Nothing,  alas !  is  so  old,  so  corroded  with 
time,  but  it  was  once  brand  new,  the  pleasant  novelty  of 


OF  FACTS.  WITH   ALIEN   AUTOCOSMS       143 

the  day  to  beings  looking  back  upon  an  immemorial  anti- 
quity, and  now  long  since  mouldered  to  dust.  Every 
blurred  inscription,  every  crumbling  pillar  and  shattered 
fragment  had  once  its  life,  its  meaning,  its  public. 

The  hand  of  time  in  eliminating  the  topical  element  and 
reducing  a  picture  to  pure  Art  —  the  inactive  beauty  that 
is  its  own  end  —  removes  from  our  perception  the  full 
reality  of  the  art  phenomenon  as  it  fell  from  the  artist's 
hand  into  time  and  space. 

Some  parts  of  this  original  plenitude  were  indeed  better 
forgotten,  for  the  Old  Masters  who  were  young  once, 
young  and  impecunious,  turned  Renaissance  art  into  a 
fancy  dress  ball  of  their  patrons,  the  Magnificent  Ones 
figuring  as  saints  and  patriarchs,  Bethlehem  shepherds  and 
Magian  kings,  whom  oblivious  time  has  done  well  to  mel- 
low into  a  quasi-anonymity.  But  if  the  loss  of  such  in- 
tellectual elements  is  a  gain,  I  am  less  certain  as  to  the 
evaporation  of  the  emotional  auras  of  works  of  art. 

Andrea  Orcagna  worked  ten  years  at  the  marble  Gothic 
Tabernacle  that  stands  in  the  fuscous  Or  San  Michele  of 
Florence,  and  men  of  other  races  and  faiths  gaze  perfunc- 
torily upon  its  decorative  jewelled  marvels,  its  pictorial 
reliefs,  wrought  after  the  plague  of  13i8  from  the  pious 
legacies  of  the  dead  or  the  thank-offerings  of  the  survivors. 
The  marble  gleams  in  the  immortal  inactive  beauty  that 
is  its  own  end  —  but  where  are  the  hope  and  the  faith,  the 
mourning  and  the  anguish  that  made  the  atmosphere  in 
which  its  beauty  had  birth  ?  Ebbed  to  the  eternal  silence 
like  that  great  wave  of  popular  rejoicing  on  which 
Cimabue's  3fadonna  was  carried  to  S.  Maria  Novella,  or  a 
picture  of  Duccio's  to  its  due  church  in  Siena.  Can  it  be 
that  Art,  launched  thus  upon  a  sea  of  emotion,  is  only  its 
true  self  when  stranded  high  and  dry  upon  the  beach  ? 

Is  perhaps  its  most  precious  aspect  precisely  that  by 
which  it  is  related  to  life  ?  And  its  least  precious  part 
that  which  remains  over  for  the  connoisseur  of  beauty  ? 


1-14  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

Oh,  but  this  is  heresy,  almost  the  philistinism  of  a  Tolstoy 
or  a  Savonarola. 

But  believe  me,  my  dear  Virtuosi,  that  flavour  which 
the  citizens  of  the  Joyous  Quarter  tasted,  that  wild-straw- 
berry flavour  of  living,  that  dog-rose  aroma  of  reality 
which  you  miss  by  your  wilful  avoidance  of  volitional  re- 
lations, by  your  gospel  of  Art  for  Art's  sake,  is  as  ex- 
quisite as  any  of  your  hot-house  flowers  and  fruitage. 
Are  you  rushing  in  pursuit  of  the  new  pleasure  ?  Nay,  it 
can  only  be  captured  by  those  who  do  not  pursue  it,  who 
are  even  unaware  that  it  exists.  Mill's  eudseraonistic 
paradox  again,  you  see. 

Has  any  professional  hunter  of  the  aesthetic  ever,  I  wonder, 
had  so  exquisite  a  sense  of  the  starry  heaven  as  Garibaldi 
when  lie  embarked  from  Quarto  to  redeem  his  country  ? 
"  O  night  of  the  fifth  of  May,  lit  up  with  the  fire  of  a 
thousand  lamps  with  which  the  Omnipotent  has  adorned 
the  Infinite  !  Beautiful,  tranquil,  solemn  with  that  so- 
lemnity which  swells  the  hearts  of  generous  men  when 
they  go  forth  to  free  the  slave  I  " 

"  He  never  tampered  with  his  sense  of  reality."  These 
words  came  to  me  as  the  epitaph  of  an  old  Jewish  pedlar 
when  I  heard  of  his  passing  away  in  far-off  Jerusalem. 
He  too  knew  this  joy  of  the  Allegro  Borgo  (though  in  his 
autocosm  the  Madonna  was  an  idol)  and  gleams  of  it  sus- 
tained him  through  long  years  of  poverty  and  pain,  and 
through  the  shadows  of  his  closing  hour.  Pictures,  songs, 
histories  —  all  had  no  existence  for  him  outside  his  re- 
ligion. All  were  but  ministers  of  faith,  to  feed  its  sacred 
flame.  There  was  not  in  his  whole  life  a  moment  of  di- 
vorce between  reality  and  consciousness.  In  such  sim- 
plicity, what  a  unity,  what  a  giant  strength !  Pitiful  ye 
seem  in  comparison,  ye  unshelled  aesthetes,  wandering  in 
search  of  an  autocosm  or  yearning  to  inhabit  every  one  in 
turn.  Imagine  it,  to  live  the  years  of  the  Patriarch  in  our 
complex   tortured   era,   and   never   to  have  had  an  art- 


OF   FACTS   WITH   ALIEN   AUTOCOSMS       145 

emotion,  never  —  save  perhaps  in  childhood  —  to  have 
known  make-believe,  never  to  have  sundered  vision  and 
idea  from  actuality  !  Think  of  it,  ye  who  have  played 
such  tricks  with  your  souls  as  would  make  the  angels 
weep,  whose  pious  emotion  has  as  much  relation  to  religion 
as  the  enjoyment  of  a  painted  ocean  to  a  struggle  in  the 
blind  waters.  You,  Monsieur  Loti  of  the  Academie 
Frangaise,  with  your  vain  literary  vigil  at  the  Holy 
Sepulchre,  will  you  not  envy  this  high  seriousness  which 
found  an  exaltation  in  forty  fasts  a  year,  without  bite  or 
sup,  and  drew  a  salty  vitalisation  from  the  tear  of  peni- 
tence ?  And  you,  sophisters  of  religion,  who  cling  to  your 
creed  because  it  is  good  for  the  poor,  or  a  beautiful  tradi- 
tion, or  a  branch  of  respectability  ;  and  above  all,  you, 
amateurs  of  '  la  volupte  dans  la  devotion,''''  after  the  recipe  of 
Barres  ;  you,  neo-Catholics  who  mistake  masturbation  for 
adoration,  bow  your  heads  before  one  who  worshipped 
God  as  naively  as  a  dog  adores  his  master,  who  did  not 
even  know  that  he  believed,  who  ivas  belief ;  who  went  to 
Jerusalem  not  because  he  was  a  Zionist  but  because  it  was 
Zion,  whose  tears  at  the  Wailing  Wall  were  tinctured 
with  never  a  thought  of  the  wonder  and  picturesqueness 
of  weeping  over  a  Zion  lost  eighteen  hundred  years  before 
he  was  born  !  Poor  Parsifal  !  Poor  pure  fool !  Gone  is 
thy  restful  simplicity.     Persiflage  is  now  our  wisdom. 

But  because  I  have  been  privileged  to  see  this  sancta 
simplicitas  of  the  old  Jewish  pedlar,  I  feel  I  know  my 
Middle  Ages  better  than  the  Protestant  connoisseur  whose 
learning  flattens  me  out,  or  the  pseudo-Catholic  in  search 
of  sensations.  I  understand  the  Allegro  Borgo,  I  say, 
and  I  am  not  appalled  by  the  terrible  list  of  Christian  for- 
geries and  legends,  the  apocryphal  Gospels,  the  pseudo- 
Epistles,  the  hagiologies,  for  I  know  that  'tis  the  dry  light 
of  literary  history  that  is  false  —  like  every  other  science 
—  and  that  in  life  all  these  figments  may  have  been  the 
harmless  nutriment  of  saintly  souls.     In  this  old  Jew's 


U6  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

autocosm,  too,  there  were  no  physical  impossibilities,  no 
incredible  miracles,  no  monsters  or  leviathans  so  strange 
but  their  names  in  Hebrew  letters  were  a  certificate  of 
pedigree  ;  the  centuries  were  fused  for  him  as  by  a  cosmic 
cinematograph,  the  patriarchs  and  saints  hovering  over 
him  in  immortal  synchrony.  So  am  I  not  taken  aback  to 
see  the  Bambino  still  in  his  mother's  lap  by  the  time  the 
Visconti  present  the  Certosa  to  the  Madonna,  nor  does  it 
disconcert  me  to  behold  all  the  abbots  and  bishops  of 
Christendom  in  attendance  at  the  Crucifixion  with  consol- 
ing models  of  their  churches.  And  as  for  the  Madonna 
being  an  Italian  grande  dame  dressed  in  Venetian  silks  or 
Florentine  brocades,  how  else,  pray,  are  we  to  preserve 
religion  ?  True  local  colour  and  true  Jerusalem  costum- 
ing would  have  brought  relativity  into  the  absoluteness  of 
belief,  would  have  been  a  reminder  that  the  Madonna  was 
a  foreigner.     The  truer  truth  is  that  she  is  Our  Lady. 

Art,  you  see,  had  in  its  palmy  days  to  be  a  full-orbed 
reality,  carrying  conviction  as  well  as  beauty  to  the  guile- 
less beholder.  To  us  too  'tis  only  the  masterpiece  attuned 
to  our  own  macrocosm  that  can  give  us  this  plenary  satis- 
faction. Even  "  Paradise  Lost "  is  for  us  merely  a  magnifi- 
cent banquet  of  words,  the  virgin  bloom  of  Paradise  truly 
lost  with  our  faith  in  the  groundwork  of  the  epic.  Tol- 
stoy's attack  on  Art  fails  to  differentiate  between  the  Art 
of  alien  autocosms,  the  Culture  Art  which  divides  our  soul 
against  itself,  and  the  real  vitalising  Art  of  our  own  epoch. 
For  though  we  say,  "  Blessed  are  the  simple,  who  live  in 
the  Absolute,"  'tis  no  necessary  converse  to  cry  damna- 
tion on  the  complex.  Art,  we  know,  is  in  a  sense  a  play- 
ing with  life,  an  outcome,  as  Schiller  said,  of  the  play- 
impulse,  the  exuberance  of  energies  not  exhausted  in  the 
struggle  for  existence.  This  is  what  Carlyle  felt  when  he 
denounced  mere  rhymesters  and  canvas-colourers  ;  it  was 
the  secret  of  his  "  imperfect  sympathies  "  (in  Elia's  phrase) 
with  Shakespeare  himself.     'Tis  Hebraism  versus  Helen- 


OF   FACTS   WITH   ALIEN   AUTOCOSMS       147 

ism  —  the  earnestness  of  the  writers  of  the  Bible,  whose 
Art  is  an  unconscious  enhancement,  a  by-product  struck 
off  at  white  heat,  versus  the  self-conscious  manipulation  of 
themes  by  -3^schylus  or  Sophocles.  A  sense  of  futility 
and  superfluity,  if  not  of  positive  pravity,  lies  behind  the 
eternal  distrust  of  the  Puritan  for  the  make-believe  of  Art, 
his  suspicion  of  the  theatre  and  the  nudities  of  Pagan 
sculpture.  A  prick  of  atavistic  Calvinism  caused  the 
writer  with  the  profoundest  instinct  for  make-believe  our 
generation  has  seen  —  Robert  Louis  Stevenson  —  suddenly 
to  declare  that  the  artist  was  no  better  than  a  fiUe  de  joie. 
But  this  was  because  the  bulk  of  Stevenson's  fiction  — 
unlike  his  essays  and  his  poetry  —  is  Art  in  its  anecdo- 
tage,  without  serious  relation  to  the  spirit.  And  there 
are  moods  in  which  a  jejune  elegance  or  an  empty  exhilara- 
tion is  as  unsatisfying  as  a  lady's  boudoir  ;  and  the  artist, 
as  a  maker  of  beautiful  toys,  must  sink  into  the  same 
place  as  the  contriver  of  perfumes  and  cushions.  In 
Japan,  where  every  workman  is  an  artist.  Art  is  in  its 
proper  place,  and  there  is  neither  cant  nor  confusion. 
But  besides  the  little  Art  of  decorative  line  and  melodious 
tinkle  and  romantic  falsification  of  life  there  is  the  greater 
Art  which  has  in  it  the  unrest  of  the  ocean  and  the  silence 
of  the  starry  night.  Art,  if  in  some  instances  it  has 
sprung  direct  from  the  play-impulse,  has  largely  come  to 
us  by  way  of  religion,  and  where  it  is  merely  play  for 
play's  sake  —  as  in  rococo  Art  — it  is  doomed  to  sterility. 
Although  Art  represents,  yet,  as  photography  came  to 
prove,  representation  is  not  the  aim  of  Art.  The  aim  of 
Art  is  creation — creation  that  stimulates  the  soul.  The 
artist  has  not  to  reproduce  his  model,  but  to  create  some- 
thing new,  living,  and  stimulating  by  help  of  it.  He  adds 
new  creations  to  Nature.  He  marries  her  facts  to  his 
passion  and  pain,  and  the  offspring  is  Art  —  Nature  crossed 
by  Man.  The  great  odes  of  Keats  and  Wordsworth,  the 
symphonies   of  Beethoven,   the   pictures   of   Bellini,  the 


148  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

statues  of  Michelangelo,  transmit  to  us  the  artists'  spirit- 
ual exaltations,  their  ideals  of  beauty  and  energy.  It 
boots  not  to  point  out  that  the  artist  is  often  selfish  and 
licentious,  irritable  and  vain.  It  is  the  greatness  of  his 
soul,  not  its  pettinesses,  which  he  puts  into  his  art ;  his 
emotions  and  ideals  into  its  content,  his  sincerity  into  its 
craftsmanship.  And  by  greatnesses  I  do  not  mean  only 
moral  greatnesses,  for  life  is  larger  than  morality.  It  is  his 
own  temperament  with  which  the  artist  crosses  Nature. 
And  that  is  why  schools  of  Art  can  never  yield  more 
than  craft  :  new  creations  can  only  be  got  by  new 
crossings. 

I  would  grant  the  Puritan,  to  whom  all  Art  is  of  Satan, 
as  I  would  grant  his  strange  ally,  Plato,  that  eesthetics 
may  be  abused,  especially  when  divorced  from  life. 
There  are  young  ladies  who  consume  a  novel  a  day,  Sun- 
days not  omitted,  by  which  process  half  their  waking 
life  is  passed  in  a  species  of  opium-eating.  There  are 
amateurs  of  music  whose  life  is  a  surfeit  of  sweet  sounds, 
and  picture-lovers  whose  day  is  an  orgy  of  line  and  colour. 
But  when  Tolstoy,  perceiving  what  a  sensual  sty  of  Fine 
Art  we  may  wallow  in,  ranged  himself  with  the  old  Puri- 
tan iconoclasts,  and  launched  his  famous  Platonic  encyclical 
against  music  divorced  from  public  psalmody,  song  sun- 
dered from  harvest-festivity,  or  poetry  that  was  not  a 
marching  song  to  the  Millennium,  he  overlooked  that  even 
a  healthy  soul  may  have  a  surplusage  of  play-energy  — 
nay,  that  this  is  the  very  child-soul  —  and  that  even  from 
a  Puritan  point  of  view  Fine  Art  may  purify  for  fine 
Action,  though  it  lack  the  direct  nexus  with  Action. 
Tolstoy's  tracts  on  religion  may  even  be  less  vitalising  for 
our  age  than  "  Anna  Karenina  "  operating  by  way  of  the 
Aristotelian  katharsis. 

And  the  relation  of  so-called  fiction  to  truth  may  be 
even  closer  than  its  nexus  with  Action.  For  it  follows 
from  our  analysis  of  Science  that  novels  and  plays  have 


OF  FACTS   WITH  ALIEN  AUTOCOSMS       149 

the  great  initial  veracity  of  reproducing  the  fulness  of 
life  as  compared  with  the  segregative  sciences  with  their 
one-sided  abstractions,  which  are  to  actuality  as  the  con- 
jugations in  a  Greek  grammar  are  to  a  conversation  with 
Helen  of  Troy.  While  the  artificial  selection  of  Science 
breaks  a  whole  into  parts,  the  artificial  selection  of  Art  can 
make  a  part  truly  represent  the  whole.  And  the  greater 
the  artist-soul  the  less  will  it  play  with  its  moods  by  the 
artificial  and  conscious  refraction  of  Art  for  Art's  sake. 
None  should  know  better  than  Tolstoy  that  the  highest  Art  is 
only  Truth  seen  as  Beauty.  The  great  artist's  registration 
and  reflection  of  the  universe  in  tone  or  colour,  line  or 
word,  is,  indeed,  the  highest  form  of  Science  at  our  com- 
mand, fact  and  flower  in  one.  "  Beauty  is  Truth,  Truth 
Beauty."  Sophocles,  Shakespeare,  Dante,  Michelangelo, 
Beethoven,  Milton,  Browning,  were  not  playing  with  life. 
The  world  of  Art  may  not  be  the  world  of  Science,  but 
it  is  the  world  we  live  in,  the  human  world  furnished 
with  faith  and  emotion,  no  less  "  real "  than  the  naked 
universe  of  physical  law. 

To  accept  Art  for  Art's  sake,  to  divorce  it  from  life, 
would  be  to  pigeon-hole  our  souls,  as  most  people  put 
their  religion  into  Sundays.  The  deepest  analysis  seems 
to  conduct  us  back  to  a  recognition  that  Art  and  Reality, 
though  they  have  no  necessary  relation,  do  actually  tend 
to  approach  each  other  in  the  greatest  Art.  The  greatest 
writers —  a  Shakespeare  or  a  Tourgenieff — in  that  selection 
from  life  which  constitutes  Art,  select  so  as  to  give  a  sense 
of  the  whole,  avoiding  the  one-sided  selection  which  gives 
us  on  the  one  hand  the  disproportionate  sexualities  of  the 
Palais-Royal  farce  or  of  the  elegant  bawdy-book,  on  the  other 
the  disproportionate  sentimentalisms  of  goody-goody  fiction. 
In  painting,  too,  the  Art  which  seizes  the  essence  of  places 
and  people  is  the  greatest,  and  I  believe  the  greatest  music 
seizes  the  essence  of  moods.  Moreover,  it  is  only  by  their 
relations  to  human  realities  that  imagfinative  creations  like 


150  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

Goethe's  Mepliistopheles  or  Swift's  Lilliputians,  the 
Prometheus  of  iEschylus,  the  Caliban  of  Shakespeare,  or 
the  Jungle-Beasts  of  Kipling,  have  power  to  hold  us.  It 
may  give  us  a  useful  distinction  between  Imagination  and 
Fancy  to  connect  the  one  with  invention  along  the  lines  of 
life  and  born  of  insight  into  its  essence  —  as  in  the  creation 
of  Hamlet  ;  the  other  with  artificial  invention  —  as  in  the 
creation  of  Alice's  Wonderland.  Whether  Hamlet  existed 
or  not,  or  that  Prince  Hal  did  exist,  is  irrelevant  to  Art. 
The  transient  reality  has  been  replaced  by  the  permanent 
creation.  Per  contra,  what  was  meant  as  Truth  may 
survive  only  as  Art,  like  the  mythological  parts  of  the 
"Iliad,"  "Macbeth,"  "Paradise  Lost,"  or  the  "Divina 
Commedia."  Yet,  as  I  have  just  pointed  out,  even  these 
great  artistic  creations  lose  their  hold  in  proportion  as 
they  cease  to  seem  in  correspondence  with  external  realities. 
And  if  the  supreme  test  of  plastic  and  literary  Art  is  its 
communication  of  a  sense  of  life,  is  it  not  Truth  we  are 
really  worshipping.  Truth  under  another  name  ?  For 
lifelikeness,  if  it  does  not  necessarily  mean  likeness  to 
particular  individuals,  does  necessarily  mean  likeness  to 
universals.  And  Selection,  though  it  omits  portions  of 
the  truth,  does  not  omit  the  whole  truth — nay,  sometimes 
reveals  the  whole  truth  by  cutting  away  the  obscuring  de- 
tails. Reality  is  the  inexhaustible/ows  et  origo  of  all  great 
Art  ;  apart  from  which  there  is  no  life  in  Art,  but  a  rootless, 
sapless,  soulless  simulacrum.  So  that  with  the  supreme 
artist,  the  Puritan  antithesis  of  Truth  and  Art,  Reality  and 
Make-believe,  Hebraism  and  Hellenism,  disappears.  A 
Sophocles  is  as  earnest  as  a  Socrates,  a  Michelanglo  as  a 
Savoutcrola,  a  Shakespeare  as  a  Luther,  a  Beethoven  as  a 
Darwin. 

As  earnest,  but  not  as  limited.  The  biggest  souls  have 
never  been  able  to  express  tlieir  sense  of  the  multiform 
flowingness  of  things  in  neat  packets  of  propositions; 
they  have  expressed  it  through  the  infinitude   of   Art. 


OF  FACTS   WITH  ALIEN  AUTOCOSMS       151 

And  Art,  having  once  in  human  history  been  the  medium 
of  the  spirit,  must  never  sink  back  into  a  soulless  toy. 
The  Art  of  the  future  must  vivify  Science  and  take  it  up 
into  Life  ;  it  must  touch  Truth  with  emotion  and  exalt  it 
into  Religion. 


ST.    FRANCIS:    OR   THE   IRONY   OF 
INSTITUTIONS 

Ludibria  rerum  humanarum  cuuctis  in  negotiis. 

Tacitus. 
I 

So  eccomi  back  in  Assisi,  after  heaven  knows  how  many- 
years,  and  here  is  the  same  bland  Franciscan  —  or  his 
brother  —  to  show  me  the  same  tiny  monastery  garden 
with  the  same  rusty  rose-bushes  and  tell  me  the  same 
story  of  how  its  native  thorns  and  briars  turned  into 
thornless  roses  with  blood-specked  leaves  after  St,  Francis 
had  rolled  in  them  to  subdue  the  flesh,  and  the  same  anec- 
dote of  the  neophyte  who  refused  to  plant  cabbages  with 
their  roots  upward  and  was  rejected  by  the  saint  as  in- 
sufficiently simple  and  obedient,  and  I  ask  the  same  ques- 
tion as  to  the  botanic  results  of  planting  cabbages  topsy- 
turvy and  receive  the  same  beaming  reassurance  that  they 
waxed  to  prize  dimensions,  while  a  blight  fell  on  those 
whose  roots  had,  with  worldly-wise  presumption,  been 
planted  in  earth.  And  I  am  shown  the  same  little  hut 
which  the  saint  occupied,  with  the  same  unnatural  eccle- 
siastic vaulting  and  the  same  unnatural  oratory  above  it, 
and  I  go  again  into  the  same  Lilliputian  church  (twenty- 
two  feet  by  thirteen)  beloved  of  St.  Francis,  with  its  rude 
plaster  and  its  wooden  benches  and  its  plain  brass  lamps, 
and  receive  the  same  shock  at  the  thought  of  its  asphyxia- 
tion beneath  the  giant  grandeur  of  S.  Maria  of  the  Angels, 
that  spreads  over  it  like  a  golden  eagle  brooding  a  street 
sparrow.  And  from  the  door  of  this  dear  little  Portiuncula 
I  glean  the  same  glad  tidings  that  Pope  Gregory  XIII.  at 

162 


ST.   FRANCIS  153 

the  instance  of  the  most  illustrious  Cardinal  Sforza  has 
conceded  to  every  faithful  Christian  who  will  say  (or  pay 
for)  a  mass  at  its  altar  the  grace  of  liberating  a  soul  from 
Purgatory.  And  I  am  given  the  same  illuminated  leaflet 
about  St.  Francis,  with  the  same  specimen  of  ensanguined 
rose-leaf — precisely  like  that  which  grows  in  my  own  gar- 
den—  and  I  pay  the  same  lira  on  the  same  spot  where  St. 
Francis,  who  called  coins  "  flies,"  had  some  of  these  pests, 
innocently  offered  by  a  worshipper,  thrown  out  upon  asses' 
dung.  The  only  change  since  my  last  visit  is  that  a  fig- 
tree  has  been  planted  "  by  request "  in  remembrance  of 
the  old  tree  in  which  Sister  Grasshopper  sang  with  the 
saint  for  eighty  days. 

And  this  "  by  request "  is  a  vivid  reminder  that  the 
Franciscan  legend  is  flourishing  more  and  more,  like  the 
topsy-turvy  cabbage,  and  that  shoals  of  pleasure-pilgrims, 
richly  clad,  come  by  carriage  or  motor  to  maunder  over 
"  the  little  poor  man  of  Assisi,"  to  gloat  upon  the  cord  of 
his  tunic,  stored  up  in  a  cupboard,  and  to  gain  an  appetite 
for  lunch  by  rhapsodising  over  the  cell  in  which  he  fasted. 
Yes,  the  lover  of  poverty  and  of  the  brute  creation  has 
brought  a  good  deal  of  money  to  the  little  hill-town,  and 
no  small  sum  of  labour  and  lashings  to  its  horses,  and  it  is 
not  surprising  that  the  region  round  the  poor  little  aban- 
doned church  of  S.  Maria  in  Portiuncula  has  grown  up  in 
the  last  quarter  of  a  century  into  a  big  suburb,  with  eat- 
ing- and  lodging-houses,  or  that  the  successors  of  the  saint 
who  in  his  horror  of  property  tried  to  tear  down  the 
chapter-house  built  for  him,  and  who  left  even  his  cell 
because  somebody  referred  to  it  as  St.  Francis's,  have 
within  the  last  ten  years  been  able  to  enrich  their  vast 
basilica  with  three  elaborate  carven  doors  and  an  iron 
railing,  not  to  mention  the  horrible  modern  fresco  with 
six  angels  like  ballet-girls  hovering  without  the  chapel 
where  St.  Francis  died. 

As  I  leave  this  musty  S.  Maria  of  the  Angels  and  mount 


154  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

on  this  divine  spring  day  towards  the  sunny  hill-top  where 
Assisi  proper  sits  rock-hewn,  with  its  towers,  domes,  and 
castles,  and  see  beneath  me  the  wonderful  rolling  Apen- 
nines, and  the  windings  of  white  roads  and  silver  streams, 
and  around  me  the  grey-green  of  olives  and  the  bridal 
white  of  cherry-trees,  and  above  me  the  cloud-galleons 
sailing  in  the  great  spaces  of  sky,  a  remark  of  the  bland 
brother  comes  back  to  me  with  added  significance.  "  We 
do  not  know  where  St.  Francis's  heart  is,"  he  said,  grudg- 
ingly conceding  that  the  rival  church  on  high  possessed 
his  body.  The  fancy  takes  me,  as  I  toil  up  to  this  tomb, 
that  St.  Francis's  heart  refused  to  be  buried  in  a  church, 
is  here  out  of  doors,  at  one  with  the  spring  and  the  sun- 
shine. 

And  even  more  symbolic  sounds  to  me  the  bland 
brother's  boast  that  the  colossal  church  built  over  the 
poor  little  Portiuncula  is  on  the  model  of  St.  Peter's. 
Canonisation  is  a  process  that  normally  lasts  centuries ; 
our  King  Alfred's  is  not  yet  complete.  But  twenty 
months  after  his  death  Francesco  Bernardone  was  hustled 
into  formal  saintship.  The  Pope  crushed  him  by  a  loving 
embrace,  and  over  his  beloved  doll's  house  of  a  church  was 
erected  a  copy  of  St.  Peter's  !  And  far  above,  on  the  rival 
ridge  of  Assisi,  as  if  to  give  a  culminating  irony  to  the 
symbolism,  and  as  if  one  great  church  built  over  his  body 
did  not  suffice  to  keep  him  down,  a  second  church  of  S. 
Francesco  has  been  built  on  the  top  of  the  first,  and  be- 
neath these  two  churches,  each  supplied  with  its  frescoed 
falsifications  by  the  school  of  Giotto,  the  little  brother  of 
the  poor  who  demanded  only  to  lie  among  the  criminals 
on  the  "  Infernal  Hill "  was  safely  buried. 

And  yet  not  so  safely  but  that  his  spirit  has  begun  to 
penetrate  through  all  the  layers  of  stone  and  legend. 
Perhaps  it  has  escaped  through  that  portal  of  the  upper 
church  which,  incautiously  thrown  open  to  illumine  the 
painted  miracles,  tempers  the  austere  gloom  and  the  drone 


ST.  FRANCIS  155 

of  ceaseless  psalm- saying  from  below  with  a  revealed 
greensward  and  a  piping  of  birds.  But  one  cannot 
imagine  that  his  spirit  has  gone  to  occupy  that  large  red 
throne  between  two  yellow  armchairs  which  the  fresco 
depicts  as  the  vision  of  his  appointed  seat  in  heaven,  or 
that  fiery  chariot  with  which  to  bedazzle  the  brethren  left 
behind.  These  twenty-eight  wall  frescoes,  like  the  four 
triangular  allegories  on  the  ceiling  below,  hold  little  of 
the  true  St.  Francis  (notwithstanding  that  they  are  all 
drawn  from  Franciscan  literature),  and  the  least  spiritual 
and  the  most  mythical  portions  of  the  legend,  the  demons 
flying  over  Arezzo,  or  St.  Francis  hovering  in  the  air  while 
praying,  figure  on  equal  terms  with  his  real  activities, 
while  the  picture  of  his  offering  the  Soldan  the  ordeal  of 
fire  is  an  imaginative  amplification  even  of  the  literature. 
Setting  aside  all  the  fatuous  monastic  miracles,  and  the 
more  tedious  anecdotes  of  the  Franciscan  legend  —  and  it 
must  be  remembered  that  the  earliest  dated  manuscript  of 
the  "  Fioretti "  comes  a  hundred  and  sixty-four  years  after 
the  death  of  St.  Francis  —  we  are  yet  able  to  extricate 
from  it  a  kernel  of  personality  sufficient  to  account  for  its 
genesis  and  growth,  and  it  is  this  St.  Francis  who  has  at 
length  burst  through  the  three  churches  devoted  to 
keeping  him  down  and  made  his  appeal  to  the  modern 
mind.  Yet  the  modern  mind  might  easily  misread  itself 
into  the  medieeval  mystic. 

Despite  his  marriage  to  Lady  Poverty,  St.  Francis  was 
far  from  a  conscious  rebel  against  the  glories  of  the 
Vatican.  He  was  too  humble-minded  to  be  anything  but 
a  meek  acceptant  of  the  established  Church  and  the  ruling 
ritual.  But  there  was  in  his  literal  translation  into  life 
of  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount,  the  germ  of  a  dangerous 
schism  —  a  germ  which  duly  developed  into  a  sect  of 
"  Spirituals "  for  whom  the  Gospel  of  Assisi  was  the 
Eternal  Evangel  destined  to  supersede  the  Christianity 
of  the  Vatican — and   it  is   not    an    accident    that    his 


156  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

followers,  despite  their  popularisation  of  the  idea  of  Papal 
infallibility,  gravitated  more  to  the  Ghibelline  cause  than 
to  the  Guelph,  and  were,  later  on,  formally  condemned  as 
heretics  by  John  XXII.  This  unstatesmanlike  Pope  was 
not  only  ignorant  that  persecution  is  the  seed  of  the  sect, 
but  he  undermined  the  doctrine  of  his  own  Papal  infallibil- 
ity by  thus  reversing  the  bull  of  Nicholas  III.  confirming 
their  order.  He  alleged  that  Nicholas  had  framed  it 
without  his  Cardinals,  but  the  more  logical  Minorite 
Brothers  contended  that  the  contradiction  of  his  predeces- 
sors proved  him  no  true  Pope,  but  a  usurper.  John  and 
his  successors  retorted  with  the  Holy  Inquisition,  and  the 
Franciscans  were  burnt  in  stacks  or  tortured  to  death  in 
dungeons  ;  "  martyrs,"  says  Dollinger,  "  to  the  doctrine 
of  Papal  infallibility  and  the  rule  of  poverty."  And  such 
is  the  comedy  of  Catholicism. 

One  wonders  sometimes  what  St.  Francis  would  have 
made  of  himself,  had  Christianity  never  come  his  way. 
His  own  genius  would  never  have  created  the  melancholy 
dogmas  of  the  mediaeval  Church.  There  is  neither  Christ 
nor  Atonement  in  his  Canticle  to  the  Sun  —  his  most 
characteristic  utterance.  The  Christianity  he  absorbed 
from  his  environment  makes  but  a  hybrid  composite  with 
his  essential  personality.  There  is  thus  no  real  unity  in 
his  spiritual  being,  no  real  reconciliation  between  his 
theory  of  utter  abnegation  and  unworthiness,  and  his 
cheerful  mystic  oneness  with  the  material  universe  and  all 
its  creatures.  That  everything  God  has  created  is  laud- 
able except  one's  self,  and  that  all  matter  is  sacramental 
except  one's  own  body,  is  scarcely  a  congruous  creed. 
And  he  followed  his  Christianity  for  the  most  part  with  a 
prosaic  literality  that  showed  that  here  he  was  but  a  pas- 
sive receiver,  as  in  his  pharisaic  prohibition  against  the 
brethren's  practice  of  soaking  pulse  the  evening  before  it 
was  eaten,  on  the  ground  that  this  meant  taking  thought 
for   the   morrow.      Not   to   soak   it,    is   precisely   taking 


ST.   FRANCIS  157 

thought,  since  it  is  concentrating  attention  on  a  triviality. 
But  in  liis  tender  mystic  universalism  on  the  other  hand 
he  was  a  master,  a  creator.  "  Our  Brother  tlie  Sun," 
"  Our  Sister  the  Moon,"  "Our  Sister,  Water,"  "Our  little 
Brothers  and  Sisters  the  Birds,"  "  Our  Sister  the  Death 
of  the  Body  "  —  these  are  the  mintings  of  an  original 
genius,  not  that  tame  subservience  to  texts  which  limited 
his  wardrobe  because  of  certain  words  in  St.  Matthew. 
And  the  originality  of  this  genius  consists,  curiously 
enough,  in  the  spontaneous  reproduction  of  Hindu  op- 
timism and  universality  in  a  Western.  How  Hindu  this 
thought  is  appears  vividly  from  the  story  in  the  "  Speculum 
Perfectionis  "  that  when  St.  Francis's  drawers  caught  fire 
about  the  knee,  he  would  not  put  it  out  nor  harm  his 
Brother  Fire.  From  this  point  of  view  Hell  would  only 
be  Brother  Fire  enjoying  himself.  Yet  we  find  St.  Francis 
engaged  all  his  life  in  thwarting  the  fraternal  appetite. 
St.  Francis  would  have  been  a  greater  man,  had  he  been 
less  of  a  Christian. 

His  distinctively  Christian  sayings  are  indeed  compara- 
tively poor.  One  scans  the  record  almost  in  vain  for  any 
flash  of  the  irony  or  sublimity  of  Jesus.  The  profoundest 
remark  of  the  "  Fioretti "  —  "  everything,  good  or  bad,  that  a 
man  does,  he  does  to  himself  "  —  belongs  to  Brother  Giles 
who,  one  is  not  surprised  to  find,  left  a  book  of  "  Verba 
Aurea."  Occasionally  a  superb  transcendence  of  ritual  as 
in  St.  Francis's  remark  that  so  far  from  not  eating  meat 
when  Christ's  nativity  fell  on  a  Friday,  "  the  very  walls 
should  eat  flesh  on  such  a  day,  or  if  they  cannot  should  at 
any  rate  be  greased  outside,"  recalls  the  flouter  of  Pharisaism, 
and  we  catch  the  voice  of  an  authentic  master  in  his  exposition 
of  a  passage  of  Ezekiel  to  a  peace-loving  doctor  of  divinity 
perturbed  about  the  text:  "If  thou  proclaim  not  to  the 
wicked  man  his  wickedness,  I  will  require  his  soul  at  thy 
hand."  It  was  by  the  brightness  of  his  own  life  and  the  per- 
fume of  his  fame,  said  St.  Francis,  that  the  servant  of  God 


158  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

proclaimed  their  wickedness  to  the  wicked.  That  was  not 
precisely  the  method  of  Jesus,  and  herein  St.  Francis  is 
more  Christian  than  Christ.  Nevertheless,  if  one  had  not 
his  Hindu  utterances  to  supplement  his  Christian,  there 
would  be  little  to  distinguish  the  skinny  black-eyed  little 
strolling  preacher  from  the  numberless  narrow-browed 
ascetics  of  the  Church  except  his  childishly  dramatic 
delivery,  his  success  in  founding  an  Order  and  his  redeem- 
ing weakness  for  talking  bad  French.  It  is  that  strange 
animism  of  his  which  gives  him  his  hold  upon  us,  which, 
not  content  with  reading  a  soul  into  the  bird,  the  fish,  the 
grasshopper  and  the  wolf,  extends  with  half-savage,  half- 
childish  personalisation  to  fire  and  water,  and  even  to 
wood  and  stone,  nay  to  the  very  letters  of  the  alphabet,  so 
that  he  will  not  erase  a  letter  even  when  he  has  set  it  down 
in  error.  Behind  this  divination  of  life  in  all  things  must 
have  lain  an  ex(;[uisite  sensibility,  and  it  was  thus  his  un- 
fortunate fate  to  be  supremely  alive  to  beauty  —  even  in 
woman  —  yet  to  be  driven  by  his  creed  to  the  worship  of 
sorrow,  abnegation  and  self-inflicted  pain,  though  even 
from  these  his  subtle  nervous  system  could  snatch  a  rare 
moment  of  ecstasy,  for  so  delicately  was  he  strung  that  the 
mere  words  "  the  love  of  God  "  set  up  a  sweet  vibration 
like  a  plectrum  striking  a  lute.  How  indeed  should  the 
gay  knight,  whom  his  comrades  elected  "  King  of  the 
fools,"  change  his  sensitive  skin,  merely  because  he  turned 
to  be  "  God's  fool  "  ?  If  he  now  found  his  joy  in  the 
ecstasy  of  mystic  communion  and  absolute  abnegation,  the 
joy  was  still  at  his  core,  and  however  he  might  afflict  his 
body,  with  a  subconscious  sense  of  setting  a  model  to  his 
weaker  brethren,  it  was  impossible  for  him  to  subdue 
his  sun-worship,  or  not  to  delight  in  the  ripple  of  water, 
and  the  grace  of  birds  and  flowers  and  women.  And 
herein  he  differs  from  the  Buddha  with  whose  life-story 
and  tenderness  for  all  creation  he  has  so  much  in  common, 
but  to  whom  this  world  is  merely  a  mistake  to  be  endured 


ST.   FRANCIS  159 

till  the  nullity  of  Nirvana  is  attained.  Even  the  pseudo- 
Christian  theory  of  this  vale  of  tears  is  not  so  pessimistic 
as  Buddhism,  for  the  lachrymose  vale  is  merely  the  prelude 
to  a  mountain  of  bliss,  and  Schopenhauer's  attempt  to  pair 
Christianity  with  Buddhism  overlooked  that  the  Buddhist 
saint  lives  to  die  and  the  Christian  dies  to  live.  Kuenen 
showed  much  deeper  insight  when  he  pointed  out  that 
Buddha  does  not  value  purity  and  renunciation  as  virtue 
—  he  is  "  beyond  good  and  evil  "  —  but  as  the  best  means 
of  escape  from  life.  But  for  St.  Francis  the  world  is  not 
a  vale  of  tears.  Indeed  the  conception  of  a  world  of 
sorrow  is  contradicted  by  the  sorrowful  lives  of  the  saints. 
For  abnegation  is  pointless  if  there  is  no  happiness  to  be 
surrendered.  The  pathos  of  the  life  of  St.  Francis  lies 
precisely  in  his  exquisite  capacity  for  terrestrial  happiness, 
and  in  his  daily  crucifixion  of  every  natural  desire  at  the 
bidding  of  a  vicious  theory  of  virtue,  to  which  a  natural 
want  means  something  created  by  God  in  order  to  be 
thwarted,  and  which  makes  a  vice  of  every  necessity. 
Fortunately  he  had  from  his  Hindu  side  the  saving  grace 
of  joyousness,  and  could  rebuke  the  saturnine  visage  of 
professional  sanctity  and  even  —  towards  the  end  —  his 
own  barbarity  to  that  brotherly  ass,  his  body. 

His  disciples,  whose  affinities  with  him  were  so  imper- 
fect that  his  most  devoted  biographer  is  the  author  of  the 
"  Dies  Irse,"  attempt  indeed  to  harmonise  the  two  halves 
of  his  personality  by  the  mediation  of  texts.  If  he  loves 
even  the  humble  worm,  it  is  because  "he  had  read  that 
word  concerning  the  Saviour  :  '  I  am  a  worm  and  no  man,' " 
and  if  he  treads  reverently  on  the  stone,  it  is  not  from  some 
mystic  sense  of  a  stone-life  or  some  sacramental  sense  of  a 
divine  immanence,  but  "  for  love  of  Him  who  is  called  the 
Rock."  That  his  delight  in  water  should  be  traced  to  its 
baptismal  uses,  and  his  prohibition  against  cutting  down 
the  whole  of  a  tree  to  a  reverence  for  the  material  of  the 
cross,  was,  of  course,  inevitable.     Nor  is  it  impossible  that 


160  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

St.  Francis  occasionally  glossed  himself  over  to  himself, 
and  it  is  quite  probable  that  his  special  tenderness  for  the 
hooded  lark  was  due  to  its  quasi-monkish  cowl,  and  that 
his  comparative  coldness  to  the  ant  reposed  upon  its  pro- 
viding for  the  morrow.  For  it  was  his  tragedy  to  be  torn 
between  a  blithe  personal  revelation  of  the  divine  and  a 
stereotyped  tradition  of  sorrow,  to  constrict  his  spiritual 
genius  to  a  cut-and-dried  scheme  of  salvation,  and  to  be 
crucified  on  a  second-hand  cross.  The  stigmata  which  are 
the  best  proof  of  his  hypersesthesia  are  likewise  the  best 
evidence  of  his  spiritual  plagiarism  and  his  comparative 
failure.  For  to  be  crucified  is  not  to  be  Christ.  Jesus 
did  not  set  out  to  be  crucified,  but  to  do  his  and  his 
Father's  work.  Crucifixion  came  in  the  day's  work,  but 
was  its  interruption,  not  its  fulfilment.  The  true  imita- 
tion of  Christ  is  to  do  one's  work  though  men  crucify  one. 
But  deliberately  to  seek  crucifixion  —  even  crucifixion  of 
one's  natural  desires  —  is  to  imitate  the  accident,  not  the 
essence.  A  still  greater  perversion  is  it  to  brood  upon  the 
crude  insignia  of  the  Passion  till  auto-hypnotism  works 
miracles  in  the  flesh. 

The  followers  of  St.  Francis  pushed  the  plagiarism  so 
far  as  to  adumbrate  a  parallel  legend,  with  a  descent  into 
Purgatory  and  a  John  of  the  Chapel  who  fell  away  and 
hanged  himself,  and  by  the  latter  end  of  the  fourteenth 
century  the  parallel  was  made  precise  and  perfect  in  the 
"Liber  Conformitatum"  of  Bartolommeo  of  Pisa.  But  the 
copy  is  only  superficially  true  to  the  original.  There  is 
nothing  in  the  story  of  the  great  Galilsean  to  justify  the 
perpetual  self-torture  of  St.  Francis  in  his  morbid  quest 
of  perfect  humility  and  sinlessness.  On  the  contrary, 
Jesus  speaks  with  so  god-like  an  assurance  of  righteous- 
ness that  it  has  become  one  of  the  chief  arguments  for  his 
divinity,  as  it  is  the  chief  stumbling-block  to  the  efficacy 
of  his  example.  For  if  God  was  made  not  man  but  super- 
man, we  can  no  more  emulate  this  superman's  goodness 


ST.   FRANCIS  161 

than  his  power  of  creating  loaves  and  fishes  in  a  crisis. 
Only  if  Jesus  were  not  God  is  his  example  valuable.  But 
man  or  superman,  he  did  not  sap  his  energies  by  brooding 
on  his  own  vileness.  Buddhism,  with  all  the  apathy  that 
its  pessimism  engenders,  is  healthier  here,  since  (accord- 
ing to  the  Mahaviyuhassutta)  the  Muni,  the  Master  of 
renunciation,  never  blames  himself. 

I  sympathise  cordially  with  the  perplexities  of  Brother 
Masseo,  who,  according  to  the  "Analecta  Franciscana," 
lost  his  naturally  cheerful  countenance  under  the  difficulty 
of  believing  himself  viler  than  the  vicious  loafer;  and  who, 
when  this  peak  of  humility  was  by  grace  attained,  found 
himself  in  fresh  despondency  before  the  new  Alp  that  rose 
on  the  horizon.  "  I  am  sad  because  I  cannot  get  to  the 
point  of  feeling  that  if  any  one  cut  off  my  hands  or  feet  or 
plucked  my  eyes  out,  though  I  had  served  him  to  the  best 
of  my  power,  still  I  could  love  him  as  much  as  I  did  be- 
fore, and  be  equally  pleased  to  hear  him  well  spoken  of." 
Poor  Masseo  !  Why  should  this  worthy  brother,  a  man, 
according  to  the  "  Fioretti,"  of  great  eloquence  and  belong- 
ing to  the  inner  circle  of  St.  Francis,  waste  his  time  and 
spoil  his  valuable  cheerfulness  over  such  hypothetic  absurd- 
ities?  The  humour  of  the  last  clause  is  worthy  of  Gilbert. 

It  is  in  face  of  such  a  heautontimorumenos  as  poor  Brother 
Masseo  that  I  revolt  against  all  his  strained  ethics,  this 
gymnast  virtue  demanding  years  of  training  to  force  the 
soul  into  some  unnatural  posture  which  it  can  only  sustain 
at  best  for  a  few  seconds.  I  could  weep  over  all  this 
wasted  goodness  v/hen  I  think  of  the  wrongs  crying  out 
for  justice,  the  voice  of  lamentation  that  rises  daily  from 
the  wan  places  of  the  world.  How  much  there  is  for 
Hercules  to  labour  at  without  standing  on  his  head  and 
balancing  the  seven  deadly  virtues  on  his  toes  !  The 
beauty  of  holiness  is  often  put  on  the  same  level  as  the 
holiness  of  beauty,  as  a  self-sufficient  ideal.  But  even  as 
false  ideals  of  beauty  may  impose  themselves,  so  may  false 


162  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

ideals  of  holiness.  The  static  sanctity  of  a  Stylites  has 
loner  been  relegated  to  those  false  ideals,  and  even  a  St. 
Francis  cannot  be  accepted  as  a  model  for  to-day,  though 
a  few  satiated  souls  may  yearn  after  abnegation  as  the  last 
luxury  of  the  spirit.  There  is  much  barren  ifisthetic  admira- 
tion wasted  upon  religious  maxims  which  it  is  admitted 
would  overturn  society  if  acted  upon;  and  it  is  question- 
able, therefore,  whether  there  is  any  real  beauty  in  these, 
any  more  than  in  jewelled  watches  that  will  not  go.  Even 
when  a  rare  saint  acts  upon  them,  they  seem  to  produce 
spiritual  sickliness  rather  than  spiritual  health.  There 
is,  perhaps,  a  finer  beauty  of  holiness  in  the  life  of  a  wise 
and  good  man  of  the  world  with  a  sense  of  humour,  than 
in  the  life  of  an  ecstatic  and  underfed  saint,  whose  very 
notion  of  the  Fatherhood  of  God  lacks  the  reality  and  ful- 
ness that  comes  from  paternity. 

There  are  few  things  in  literature  more  touchingly 
simple  than  those  adventures  in  search  of  holiness,  that 
picaresque  novel  of  the  spirit,  known  as  "  The  Little 
Flowers  of  St.  Francis."  These  gentle  souls,  who  wander 
without  food  or  knapsack,  under  the  tutelage  of  the  ser- 
aphic saint,  through  the  enchanting  valleys  and  hills  of  un- 
spoiled thirteenth-century  Italy,  and  adventuring  in  even 
more  glamorous  regions,  hold  strange  parleyings  with  the 
Soldan  of  Babylon,  have  upon  them  a  morning  light  of 
innocence  and  that  perfume  of  holiness  which  can  never 
fail  to  justify  the  Master's  exposition  of  Ezekiel.  If  any- 
thing could  add  to  the  sweetness  of  the  idyll,  it  is  the 
spiritual  loves  of  St.  Francis  and  St.  Clara.  And  yet  our 
adoration  of  St.  Francis  must  not  blind  us  to  the  ques- 
tionable aspects  of  the  chronicle.  "  I  may  yet  have  sons 
and  daughters,"  he  replied  deprecatingly  to  one  who 
proclaimed  him  blessed  and  holy.  What  a  caricature  of 
true  ethics  !  Even  the  poverty  for  which  he  was  "  so 
greedy"  is  impossible  if  everybody  is  greedy  for.it,  and 
the  abnegation  he  practised  he  could  not  have  preached. 


ST.   FRANCIS  163 

Otherwise  when  he  tossed  his  own  tunic  to  a  shivering 
beggar,  he  should  have  inspired  the  beggar  to  toss  it  back 
to  his  now  shivering  self,  and  so  ad  infinitum.  That 
game  of  tunic-tennis  with  nothing  ever  scored  but  "love" 
would  have  been  true  Franciscanism,  but  also  its  reductio 
ad  absurdum.  I  do  not  wonder  that  Goethe  smiled  at  the 
"  Heiliger  "  of  Assisi,  for  neglecting  to  visit  whose  shrine 
he  was  nearly  arrested  as  a  smuggler. 

Yes,  the  bland  brother  does  well  to  babble  of  the  cabbage 
planted  with  its  leaves  in  the  ground.  For  he  has 
blundered  into  the  very  essence  of  the  Master's  teaching : 
this  topsyturvydom,  these  roots  in  the  air,  are  the  secret  of 
St.  Francis's  success.  There  is  a  tendency  to  blame  our 
paradoxists,  to  deride  their  inversions  as  mechanical.  But 
St.  Francis  is  an  inversion  incarnate,  a  paradox  in  flesh 
and  blood.  While  with  other  men  Property  is  a  sacred 
concept,  a  fetish  guarded  by  a  mesh  of  laws,  he  refuses  to 
own  anything  and  even  disposes  with  blasphemous  levity 
of  other  people's  property.  Theft  he  daringly  defines  as 
not  to  give  something  to  anybody  who  has  greater  need  of 
it  than  oneself.  He  hated  Property,  not  as  the  Socialist 
hates  it  who  covets  its  communalisation,  but  as  something 
in  itself  evil.  These  practical  inversions  of  his  have  the 
same  excuse  as  those  of  the  literary  paradoxist.  Nothing 
less  than  this  violent  antithesis  will  suffice  to  shake  men's 
notions  from  the  rigor  mortis  that  overtakes  even  true 
ideas,  or  to  offset  the  exaggeration  which  gradually  falsifies 
them.  One  false  extreme  must  be  met  by  another,  if  the 
happy  mean  is  to  be  struck. 

Pray  do  not  imagine  I  would  endorse  Aristotle's  doctrine 
of  the  mean,  or  the  popular  platitude  that  truth  always 
lies  midway  between  two  extreme  views.  On  the  contrary, 
truth  is  often  the  most  violent  and  extreme  of  all  possible 
propositions  and  right  action  the  most  violent  and  extreme 
of  all  possible  forms  of  conduct.  But  the  system  of  St. 
Francis  needed  as  much  contradiction  from  the  world  of 


164  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

common  sense  as  the  world  of  common  sense  needed  from  it. 
In  so  far  as  it  was  Cliristian,  i-t  was  an  imitation  of  early 
Christianity,  minus  the  time-limit  which  justified  its  model. 
But  the  right  course  of  action  when  the  world  is  about  to 
come  to  an  end  will  not  necessarily  be  the  right  course  if  the 
world  is  indefinitely  to  be  continued  in  our  next.  In  such  a 
world  the  system  of  St.  Francis  is  an  impossibility,  if  only 
because  it  would  bring  the  world  to  an  end  by  lack  of 
population.  And  if  it  really  succeeded,  it  would  bring 
itself  to  an  end  even  before  the  world,  for  in  the  absence 
of  owners  there  would  be  none  to  receive  alms  from,  none 
to  bake  that  bread  which  St.  Francis  naively  regarded  as 
coming  by  grace  as  simply  as  water.  This  absolute  avoid- 
ance of  money  resembles,  indeed,  nothing  so  much  as 
banking,  which  is  possible  only  if  the  bulk  of  the  investors 
do  not  ask  for  their  money  at  the  same  time.  It  is  on  the 
certainty  of  his  failure  that  the  success  of  a  saint  reposes. 
His  disciples  will  never  be  more  than  a  miserable  minority, 
and  so  he  will  seem  recuperative  and  not  destructive  to 
society.  The  exaggeration  of  his  holiness  will  mitigate 
the  materialism  of  the  average  man.  Dives  will  not  give 
up  his  dinner,  but  he  will  drop  a  crumb  for  Lazarus  and 
another  for  the  saint,  and  perhaps  eat  only  salmon  and 
trout  on  Fridays.  It  is  this  reflection  that  he  incarnates 
for  the  race  an  ideal  of  perfection,  imperfect  though  it  be 
in  its  impossibility,  that  reconciles  me  to  the  saint,  as  the 
reflection  that  the  Church  Fathers  were  engaged  in  fashion- 
ing that  ideal  reconciles  me  to  their  meticulous  morality, 
in  a  world  so  given  over  to  slaughter,  sensuality  and  every 
abomination  of  injustice  that  their  fine  shades  and  their  no- 
tion of  an  impassable  infinity  between  right  and  the  smallest 
wrong  appear  ludicrously  disproportionate  and  academic. 
The  saint  on  this  theory  is  a  scapegoat,  a  victim  on  the 
altar  of  human  selfishness ;  he  does,  suffers,  or  gives  up, 
too  much  because  most  other  persons  do,  suffer,  or  give 
up,  too  little.     He  is  sacrificed  to  the  balance  of  things, 


ST.   FRANCIS  165 

or,  as  St.  Paul  put  it,  he  is  the  leaven  to  the  lump.  Yet 
things  would  overbalance  were  he  too  successful,  and  too 
much  leaven  would  spoil  the  lump. 

If  there  is  within  St.  Francis  an  unresolved  discord  be- 
tween Hinduism  and  Christianity,  still  more  jarring  is  the 
outerdiscordbetweenNatureandChristianity  which  he  tried 
so  heroically  to  harmonise.  Don  Quixote  tilting  at  wind- 
mills is  a  practical  figure  beside  St.  Francis  trying  to  Chris- 
tianise bird  and  beast.  The  consciously  grotesque  pathos 
of  Cervantes  is  surpassed  by  the  unconsciously  grotesque 
pathos  of  the  chronicles  of  St.  Francis.  The  struggle  for 
'existence  in  Nature  —  the  angler's  hook  and  the  bird- 
catcher's  snare  —  can  hardly  be  glossed  over  by  sermons 
to  the  birds  and  the  fishes.  Doubtless  St.  Francis  had  — 
as  some  sinners  have  to-day  —  a  strange  power  of  fascina- 
tion over  the  lower  creatures,  but  the  butcher  was  not 
eliminated  because  St.  Francis  occasionally  bought  off  a 
lamb  or  a  turtle-dove.  We  know  too  little  of  the  psy- 
chology of  wild  beasts  to  deny  that  he  tamed  the  Wolf  of 
Agobio  —  though  it  is  permissible  to  doubt  the  civil  con- 
tract with  Brother  Wolf  which  in  Sassetta's  fanciful  pic- 
ture is  even  drawn  up  by  a  notary  ;  nor  is  the  stone  record 
of  the  miracle  you  may  read  to-day  on  the  fagade  of  that 
little  church  in  Gubbio  which  was  set  up  three  centuries 
later,  nor  even  the  skull  of  Brother  Wolf  himself,  found 
—  according  to  a  lady  writer  on  Gubbio  —  "precisely  on 
the  spot  pointed  out  by  tradition  as  the  burial-place  of  the 
beast,"  and  "  now  in  the  possession  of  a  gentleman  at 
Scheggia,"  as  convincing  a  testimony  as  she  imagines  "  to 
the  indubitable  truth  of  the  tradition,  and  to  the  super- 
human power  of  love  towards  every  living  creature." 
Love  has  no  such  power  to  turn  lions  and  wolves  into  civil 
contractors  or  vegetarians.  There  is  a  battle  of  beneficent 
and  sinister  forces  in  the  universe  which  Persian  specula- 
tion has  always  recognised  frankly,  but  which  Hebraic 
and  Hindu  systems,  by  their  higher  synthesis  of  Love  or 


166  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

Good,  unconsciously  whittle  away  into  a  sham  fight,  or  at 
best  a  tournament  ;  a  play  of  God  with  His  own  forces. 
'Tis  Docetism  writ  larger.  But  whether  the  fight  be  sham 
or  real,  the  universe  is  not  run  on  a  Franciscan  system, 
and  it  is  this  which  makes  the  pathos  and  the  grotesquerie 
of  the  saint's  attempts  to  equate  the  macrocosm  with  his 
autocosm.  Yes,  St.  Francis  is  as  nobly  mad  as  Don 
Quixote.  Nay,  towards  the  end,  where  the  cavalier  of 
Christ,  broken  by  disease  in  the  prime  of  his  years  — ■ 
disease  of  the  spleen,  disease  of  the  liver,  disease  of  the 
stomach,  disease  of  the  eyes  —  macerated  by  senseless 
privations,  a  mere  substratum  for  poultices  and  fomenta- 
tions and  cauterisations,  scarcely  even  washing  himself  for 
fear  of  ostentating  the  stigmata,  still  sings  songs  of  praise 
so  blithely  as  to  scandalise  his  companions'  sense  of  death- 
bed decency,  we  touch  a  more  Quixotic  pathos  than  any- 
thing in  Cervantes. 

And  these  legends  of  his  pious  influence  over  the  cicala 
and  the  swallow  and  the  wolf,  this  tench  that  plays  around 
his  boat,  this  pheasant  that  haunts  his  cell,  this  falcon  that 
wakes  him  for  matins  during  his  fast  in  the  mountain, 
these  birds  that  fly  off  in  four  companies  like  a  cross  after 
devoutly  digesting  his  sermon,  all  make  for  the  comity  of 
creation,  especially  in  Italy,  where  animals  have  no  souls, 
only  bodies  that  may  be  ill-used  :  indeed,  St.  Francis  — 
with  his  disciple  St.  Antony  of  Padua  —  contributes  to 
Christianity  that  missing  note  of  respect  for  the  animal 
creation  which  Hinduism  expresses  "  in  the  great  word 
Tat-twam-asi  (This  is  thyself  !)."  And  here  at  least  mod- 
ern thought  is  with  St.  Francis  and  his  Hindu  universal- 
ism.  The  evolution  theory  is  usually  considered  a 
depressing  doctrine,  yet  it  has  its  stimulating  aspects. 
For  though  we  may  doubt  if  St.  Francis  converted  the 
wolf,  we  cannot  doubt  that  Nature  Christianised  it,  or  at 
least  some  creature  as  low  and  savage.  For  from  some 
gibbering  ferocious  brute  there  did,  in  the  process  of  the 


ST.   FRANCIS  167 

suns,  emerge  a  seraphic,  selfless  being  witli  love  for  all 
creation.  The  wolf,  in  fact,  became  St.  Francis  ;  a  more 
notable  conversion  than  any  in  the  missionary  books. 

But  what  did  St.  Francis  become  ?  Here  the  record  is 
not  so  stimulating  ;  here  begins  degeneration,  devolution. 
Before  he  died  he  was  an  idol  and  the  nominal  centre  of 
vast  organisations,  lay  as  well  as  monastic,  female  as  well 
as  male,  and  in  this  success  lay  his  defeat.  Lachrymce. 
rerum  inhere  even  more  in  success  than  in  failure.  The 
portrait  of  St.  Francis  by  Ribera  which  may  be  seen  at 
Florence  —  a  melancholy  monk  with  his  eyes  turned  up, 
holding  a  skull  —  was  no  sadder  caricature  of  the  blithe 
little  man  who  swept  out  dirty  churches  with  a  broom  than 
these  gigantic  and  infinitely  quarrelsome  organisations 
were  of  his  teaching. 

A  great  man  may  either  influence  humanity  by  his  soli- 
tary work  or  he  may  found  an  institution.  The  institu- 
tion (if  adequately  financed)  will  live,  but  with  himself 
squeezed  out  of  it  —  for  worship  at  a  safe  height.  The 
squeezing  out  of  St.  Francis  from  Franciscanism  began 
even  before  his  death  —  the  Papacy  pressing  from  without 
and  his  own  vicars  from  within.  That  very  sensible  fear 
of  Brother  William  of  Nottingham  —  evidently  a  practical 
Briton  —  that  superfluities  would  grow  up  in  the  Order  as 
insensibly  as  hairs  in  the  beard,  was  more  than  verified. 
The  dangerous  rule  of  Absolute  Poverty  was  relaxed, 
scholastic  learning  was  reinstalled  in  its  armchair,  a  net- 
work of  rules  replaced  the  rule  of  the  spirit,  and  the  little 
brotherhood  that  had  lain  on  straw  and  tattered  mattresses 
in  the  Portiuncula  swelled  and  split  into  Conventualists 
and  Observants,  the  majority  established  in  magnificent 
monasteries.  St.  Francis  lamented  the  degeneration  of  the 
brethren,  though  he  characteristically  refused  to  punish  it. 
And  when  he  was  quite  squeezed  to  death  there  began  a 
fight  for  his  body  —  holy  body-snatching  was  a  feature  of 
the  Middle  Ages  —  and  that  vile  enemy  of  the  soul  which 


168  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

he  had  battled  against  all  his  life  took  his  place  as  the 
centre  of  the  cult.  Perugia,  holding  by  force  the  body  of 
St.  Giles,  removed  from  Assisi  the  only  possible  rival  of 
his  relics.  His  very  poultice  is  still  preserved  as  an  object 
of  edification. 

II 

Erasmus  dreamed  once  —  so  he  writes  to  Charles  Uten- 
hove  —  that  St.  Francis  came  to  thank  him  for  chastising 
the  Franciscans.  The  Founder  had  not  the  scrupulous 
stage-costume  of  his  degenerate  followers :  his  brown  frock 
was  of  undyed  wool ;  the  hood  was  not  peaked,  but 
merely  hung  behind  to  cover  the  head  in  bad  weather; 
the  cord  was  a  piece  of  rope  from  a  farmyard ;  the  feet 
were  bare.  Of  the  five  wounds  of  the  stigmata  there  was 
as  little  trace  in  St.  Francis  as  of  the  six  virtues  in  the 
F'ranciscans.  Obedience,  poverty,  chastity,  humility,  sim- 
plicity, charity — where  had  flown  these  "six  wings  of  the 
seraph  "  ? 

Eheu  fugaces !  'Tis  the  story  of  all  founders,  of  all 
orders.  St.  Francis  at  his  supreme  moment  of  renuncia- 
tion had  not  even  the  brown  frock  of  Erasmus's  dream. 
In  the  market-place  of  Assisi  he  stood  in  his  shirt.  And 
he  desired  to  die  even  more  naked,  as  Thomas  of  Celano 
and  the  "Legenda  Trium  Sociorura"  testify.  The  first 
Franciscans  were  simple  souls  kindled  by  his  love  and 
ecstasy,  "the  minstrels  of  the  dear  Lord."  They  bore 
revilement  and  scourging  ;  dragged  along  by  their  hoods, 
they  never  ceased  to  proclaim  Peace.  They  lay  a-cold  in 
caves,  with  hearts  careless  of  the  morrow ;  they  served  in 
lepers'  houses.  And  above  all  they  worked  ;  begging  was 
only  to  be  a  last  resort,  and  never  was  money  to  be  asked 
for.     "Beware  of  money,"  says  the  "  Regula." 

Brother  Elias  of  Cortona,  the  immediate  successor  of 
St.  Francis,  is  said  to  have  lived  like  a  prince,  with  valets 
and  horses,  and  he  readily  got  the  Pope  to  sanction  a  de- 


ST.  FRANCIS  169 

vice  by  which  he  obtained  all  the  money  he  wanted  per 
interpositas  personas.  Nor  did  the  Master's  teaching  fare 
better  at  the  hands  of  the  more  faithful  faction  —  the 
Observants  whom  the  Conventualists  persecuted  —  for  the 
rule  of  Absolute  Poverty  was  applied  without  the  genial 
concessions  and  exceptions  he  knew  how  to  make ;  and 
under  the  guidance  of  the  caustic  and  canonical  Antony 
of  Padua  the  ancient  gaudentes  in  Domino  hardened  into 
slaves  of  the  letter,  while  the  more  mystic  degenerated 
into  anchorites  who  retired  to  the  mountains  to  save  their 
own  souls. 

Nothing  can  point  the  tragedy  of  St.  Francis's  success 
more  vividly  than  his  own  homely  words  in  his  "Testa- 
mentum."  "  And  they  who  came  to  take  up  this  life  gave 
up  whatever  they  might  have  to  the  poor  and  were  content 
with  a  single  tunic,  patched  inside  and  out  (if  they  wished), 
together  with  a  girdle  and  drawers  :  and  we  would  have 
no  more.  We  clerks  said  the  office  like  other  clerks  ; 
the  lay-brothers  said  the  Lord's  Prayer.  We  gladly 
abode  in  poor  and  forsaken  churches,  and  were  simple 
folk  and  subject  to  all.  And  I  used  to  work  with  my 
hands,  and  I  desire  to  work,  and  my  earnest  wish 
is  that  all  the  brethren  should  work  at  some  decent 
employment." 

Only  a  century  later  Dante's  eulogy  of  the  Founder 
("Paradiso,"  Canto  XI.)  is  qualified  by  the  remark  that 
so  few  of  his  followers  cleave  to  his  teachings  that  "  a 
little  stuff  may  furnish  out  their  cloaks."  And  three 
centuries  later  the  spectacle  which  these  Fratri  Minori  rep- 
resented to  Erasmus  was  that  of  arrogant  mendicants, 
often  of  loose  morals,  begging  with  forged  testimonials, 
haunting  the  palaces  of  the  rich,  forcing  themselves  into 
families,  selling  the  Franciscan  habit  to  wealthy  dying 
sinners  as  a  funeral  cloak  to  cover  many  sins.  His  little 
sisters,  the  swallows  and  the  doves,  fluttered  over  St. 
Francis's  tomb,  but  from  it  issued  the  hawks  and  the  vul- 


170  ■     ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

tures.     An  old,  old  moral,  though  humanity  will   never 
learn  it. 

Saint  Francis  was  Francis  Saint.  The  Lady  Poverty 
"  who  for  eleven  hundred  years  had  remained  without  a 
single  suitor  "  found  in  him  a  spouse  faithful  unto  death. 
His  soul  went  out  in  fraternity  to  all  tlie  wonderful  crea- 
tion, in  joyous  surrender  to  pain  and  tribulation :  even 
Death  was  his  sister.  To  found  an  Order  of  St.  Francis 
is  to  count  upon  a  succession  of  St.  Francises.  As  well 
found  an  Order  of  Shakespeare,  a  phalanstery  of  Da  Vincis. 

In  religion  no  less  than  in  literature  or  art  the  Master 
is  ever  a  new  individual  —  "  Natura  lo  fece  e  rtqjpe  il 
tipo'''' — but  followers  ever  think  to  fix  the  free-blowing 
spirit.  Alas !  saints  may  be  summarised  in  a  system, 
but  the  system  will  not  produce  saints.  Academies, 
churches,  orders,  can  never  replace  men ;  they  too  often 
serve  to  asphyxiate  or  assassinate  such  as  appear.  St. 
Dominic,  the  sterner  founder  of  the  other  mendicant  order, 
was  not  more  fortunate  in  creating  an  apostolic  succession 
of  Poverty  than  his  friend  and  contemporary ;  and  as  for 
his  precursor,  St.  Bruno,  contrast  his  marble  image  in  the 
Certosa,  gazing  agonisedly  at  a  crucifix,  with  the  mosaics 
of  agate,  lapislazuli,  amethyst,  and  cornelian  worked  over 
the  altars  by  eight  generations  of  the  Sacchi  family,  or 
with  the  Lucullian  feasts  which  the  Carthusians  could  fur- 
nish forth  at  the  biddingf  of  the  Magnificent  Lodovico. 
St.  Bruno  retreated  to  the  desert  to  fast  and  pray,  and  the 
result  was  Chartreuse.  If  he  now  follows  the  copious  liti- 
gation he  may  well  apprehend  that  his  order  has  modified 
its  motto  and  that  for  "  Stat  crux  dum  volvitur  orbis  "  you 
should  read  "  Stat  spiritus.'" 

Benedictine,  too,  is  a  curious  by-product  of  the  first  of 
all  the  Western  orders,  and  the  one  by  which  England 
was  converted  to  Christianity.  How  pleased  the  founder 
of  Monte  Cassino  must  be  to  see  a  British  bishop  sipping 
Benedictine  ! 


ST.   FRANCIS  171 

Religion  has  not,  indeed,  lacked  saints  aware  of  the  ten- 
dency of  followers  to  substitute  the  forms  for  the  realities 
and  the  leader  for  the  spirit.  There  was  Antoinette  Bou- 
rignon,  with  her  love  for  the  free  flowing  of  the  Holy 
Ghost  and  her  hatred  of  the  Atonement  theory,  but  in  the 
absence  of  forms  her  sect  had  not  sufficient  material  frame- 
work to  maintain  itself  by.  If  the  Quakers  still  survive, 
it  is  because  they  have  erected  something  into  a  system,  if 
only  colour-blindness.  But  the  twaddle  which  is  talked 
at  Quaker  meetings  when  an  old  bore  is  played  upon  by 
the  spirit,  turns  one's  thoughts  longingly  to  a  stately  lit- 
urgy, independent  on  the  passing  generation.  Humanity 
is  indeed  between  the  devil  and  the  deep  sea.  Institutions 
strangle  the  spirit,  and  their  absence  dissipates  it. 

"Nee  tecum  possum  vivere,  nee  sine  te." 

Even  if  by  miracle  a  Church  remains  true  to  the  spirit  of 
its  founder,  this  is  a  fresh  source  of  unspirituality,  for  his 
spirit  may  be  outgrown.  An  excellent  definition  of  what 
a  Church  should  be  was  given  some  years  ago  by  a  writer 
in  the  Church  Quarterly :  "  A  National  Church,  elastic 
enough  to  provide  channels  for  fresh  manifestations  of 
spiritual  life,  yet  anchored  to  the  past."  But  where  is 
such  a  Church  to  be  found  ?  "  Anchored  to  the  past  "  — 
yes,  that  condition  is  more  than  fulfilled.  But  spiritual 
elasticity  ?  The  Church  Quarterly  reviewer  has  the  face 
to  pass  oif  his  definition  as  that  of  the  Church  of  England, 
and  to  say  that  such  a  National  Church  "  might  have  saved 
the  United  States  from  many  of  those  grotesque,  and  worse 
than  grotesque,  features  which  have  at  various  times  dis- 
figured their  spiritual  life,"  But  the  Church  of  England 
has  notoriously  failed  in  elasticity  —  even  the  Archbishop 
of  Canterbury  is  unable  to  make  it  express  his  view  of  the 
Athanasian  Creed.  And,  far  from  its  anchoring  the  spir- 
itual life  of  the  English  people,  they  have  violently  torn 
themselves  away  from  it  in  secessions  of  Baptists,  Metho- 


172  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

dists,  Quakers,  &c.  &c.  As  to  its  preserving  them  from 
grotesque  religious  features,  the  aberrations  of  English 
sectarianism  fully  equal  those  of  America,  when  the  differ- 
ence of  geographic  area  is  considered  and  the  absence  of 
supervision  over  great  spaces.  Sandemanians,  Walworth 
Jumpers,  Joanna  Southcottians,  Seventh  Day  Baptists, 
Plymouth  Brethren,  Christadelphians,  Peculiar  People  — 
such  are  a  few  of  the  British  aberrations,  some  of  which 
have  counted  distinguished  followers.  The  bequests  to 
foster  even  the  Southcott  mania  were  treated  as  sacred  by 
the  Court  of  Chancery.  Jump-to-Glory-Jane  is  an  Eng- 
lish type  put  into  poetry  by  an  English  poet.  The  sect 
to  which  Silas  Marner  belonged,  with  its  na'ive  belief  in 
drawing  lots  —  the  practical  equivalent  of  the  sortilege  of 
the  Pagan  soothsayer  —  was  not  made  in  America.  It 
was  England  which  Voltaire  ridiculed  for  its  one  sauce  and 
its  endless  sects.  The  great  scale  of  America  magnifies 
the  aberrations.  But  even  Mormonism,  Dowieism,  and 
Christian  Science  have  solid  achievements  to  their  credit. 
Salt  Lake  City  is  a  paradise  built  over  a  desert  reclaimed 
by  Mormon  labourers,  Zion  City  is  a  handsome  town  with- 
out drinking-palaces,  and  Christian  Science  has  made  more 
advances  in  the  last  generation  than  Christianity  made  in 
its  first  two  centuries,  numbering  as  it  does  its  temples  and 
its  teachers  by  the  thousand.  There  is  at  least  life  behind 
these  grotesqueries,  while  in  the  Established  Churches 
there  is  asphyxiation  by  endowments. 

Endowments  —  there  is  the  secret  of  stagnation.  It  is 
an  unhappy  truth  that  man  tends  to  become  a  parasite  on 
his  own  institutions.  Humanity  is  a  Frankenstein  that  is 
ridden  by  its  own  creations.  Its  Churches,  with  their 
cast-iron  creeds  and  their  golden  treasure-heaps,  are  the 
prisons  of  tlie  soul  of  the  future.  The  legal  decision  in 
the  great  Free  Church  fight  serves  as  what  Bacon  calls  an 
"  ostensive  instance  "  of  this  elemental  truth,  bringing  out 
as  it  does  that  the  legal  interpretation  of  a  Church  involves, 


ST.  FRANCIS  173 

not  the  elasticity  so  glibly  vaunted  by  the  Church  Quarterly 
reviewer,  but  absolute  inelasticity.  A  tiny  minority  of 
ministers  is  able,  for  a  time  at  least,  to  hold  millions  of 
money  and  hundreds  of  buildings,  because  the  vast  majority 
has  elected,  in  a  spirit  of  brotherly  love,  to  join  another 
body  from  which  it  is  separated  by  a  microscopic  point. 
There  can,  at  this  rate,  never  be  development  in  a  Church. 
The  faintest  divergence  from  old  tradition  may  justify  the 
hard-shell  orthodox  in  claiming  all  the  funds  and  regard- 
ing the  innovators  as  deserters  of  their  posts  and  proper- 
ties. All  Church  funds  are  indissolubly  connected  with 
the  doctrines  to  which  they  were  first  tacked  on,  and 
changes  in  doctrine  involve  forfeiture  of  the  belongings  in 
favour  of  those  who  have  had  the  fidelity  or  the  shrewd- 
ness to  cling  to  the  original  dogma.  How  much  change  is 
necessary  to  alter  a  creed  is  a  delicate  problem,  known  in 
logic  as  of  the  Soros  order.  For  every  day  brings  its  subtle 
increments  or  decrements,  and  a  dogma  of  imperishable 
adamant  has  not  yet  appeared  in  human  history.  Every 
dogma  has  its  day.  The  life  of  a  normally-constituted  truth 
is,  according  to  Ibsen,  twenty  years  at  the  outside,  and  aged 
truths  are  apt  to  be  shockingly  thin.  Thus  the  danger 
which  threatens  all  Churches  —  the  danger  of  having  to 
buy  their  ministers  —  is  raised  to  infinity  if  the  money  is 
thus  to  be  tied  up  by  the  dead  hand  of  the  past.  A  pre- 
mium is  placed  upon  infidelity  and  mustiness.  There  is 
no  Church  or  religious  body  in  the  world  which  is  not 
weighted  with  pecuniar}'-  substance,  from  Rome  to  the 
Order  we  have  been  considering,  founded  for  the  preach- 
ment of  Absolute  Poverty.  The  continuity  of  policy 
which  the  Church  Quarterly  applauds  becomes  a  mere  con- 
tinuity of  property,  if  progress  is  to  be  thus  penalised. 
Nor  are  the  Dissenting  bodies  immune  from  this  pecuniary 
peril.  A  Calvinist  chapel  in  Doncaster  that  was  gravitat- 
ing to  the  New  Theology  has  found  itself  closed  pro  tern. 
under  its  trust  deed  of  1802. 


174  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

The  remedy  for  this  clogging  of  spiritual  life  is  clear. 
It  was  always  obvious,  but  when  Property  is  in  danger  one 
begins  to  consider  things  seriously. 

Every  Church  and  sect  must  be  wound  up  after  three 
generations.     The  time-limit  needs  elucidation. 

The  first  generation  of  a  Church  or  a  heresy  —  the 
terms  are  synonymous,  for  every  Church  starts  as  a  heresy 
—  is  full  to  the  brim  of  vitality,  fire,  revolt,  sincerity, 
spirituality,  self-sacrifice.  It  is  a  generation  in  love,  a 
generation  exalted  and  enkindled  by  the  new  truth,  a  gen- 
eration that  will  count  life  and  lucre  equally  base  beside 
the  spreading  of  the  new  fire.  The  second  generation  has 
witnessed  this  fervour  of  its  fathers,  it  has  been  nourished 
in  the  warmth  of  the  doctrine,  its  education  is  imprinted 
with  the  true  fiery  stamp.  It  is  still  near  the  Holy  Ghost. 
In  tlie  third  generation  the  waves  radiated  from  the 
primal  fire  have  cooled  in  their  passage  through  time  ;  the 
original  momentum  tends  to  be  exhausted.  Now  is  the 
period  of  the  smug  Pharisees  profiting  by  the  martyrdoms 
of  their  ancestors,  babbling  rhetorically —  between  two 
pleasures  —  of  their  fidelity  to  the  faith  of  their  fathers. 
If  the  third  generation  of  a  Church  can  get  through  with 
fair  spiritual  success,  it  is  often  only  because  of  a  revival 
of  persecution.  But  the  third  generation  is  absolutely  the 
limit  of  the  spiritual  stirring.  In  the  fourth  generation 
you  shall  ever  find  the  young  people  sly  sceptics  or  sullen 
rebels,  and  the  Vicar  of  Bray  coming  in  for  high  prefer- 
ment. Here,  then,  is  the  limitation  dictated  by  human 
nature.  The  life  of  a  Church  should  be  wound  up  by  the 
State.  The  birth  of  a  heresy  must  be  free  to  all,  and 
should  be  registered  like  the  birth  of  a  child.  It  would 
expose  its  adherents  to  no  disadvantages,  either  religious 
or  political.  But  after  three  generations  it  must  be 
wound  up. 

Of  course,  it  should  be  perfectly  open  for  the  Church 
to  reconstitute  itself  immediately,  but  it  should  do  this 


ST.   FRANCIS  175 

under  a  new  name.  If  it  started  again  afresh,  the  com- 
pulsory winding-up  would  have  acted  as  a  species  of 
persecution  and  thoroughly  revitalised  the  content  of  the 
particular  credo.  The  third  generation  would  have 
strained  every  sinew  to  realise  their  faith  and  bring  it 
home  to  the  young  and  fourth  generation.  The  latter, 
ere  re-establishing  the  Church,  would  have  rediscovered 
its  truth,  and  thereby  given  it  fresh  momentum  to  carry 
it  through  another  three  generations.  This  simple  system 
would  allow  children  to  continue  the  faith  of  their  fathers 
from  conviction  instead  of  compulsion,  and,  by  terminating 
the  right  to  property,  would  save  posterity  from  the 
asphyxiation  of  benefactions. 

The  life  of  a  generation  is  computed  by  biological 
statisticians  at  thirty-three  years.  Three  generations 
would  thus  make  ninety-nine  years.  A  century  brings 
such  changes  in  thought  and  things  that  the  excerpts 
from  the  Times  of  a  hundred  years  ago  read  like  the 
journalism  of  another  planet. 

The  bequests  by  which  eleven  old  gentlewomen  of  a 
certain  parish,  that  has  been  swept  away,  receive  groats 
of  an  abolished  currency,  on  a  day  that  has  disappeared 
from  the  calendar,  to  perpetuate  the  memor}^  of  a  benevo- 
lent megalomaniac,  would,  on  a  similar  principle,  be 
limited  to  the  natural  run  of  a  century.  It  is  enough 
to  be  allowed  a  dead  finger  in  the  pie  of  proximate 
posterity,  "  a  century  not  out  "  must  never  be  written  over 
any  human  will  or  institution. 

If  this  time-limit  seems  a  trifle  harsh,  apply  it,  dear 
reader,  not  to  your  own  creed,  but  to  something  esoteric, 
like  the  doctrine  of  the  Dalai  Lamas  of  Tibet,  which  has 
for  so  many  centuries  paralysed  a  priest-ridden  Asiatic 
population.  Do  you  think  this  theory  of  reincarnation 
deserved  a  longer  run  than  three  generations  ? 


THE     GAY     DOGES:     OR    THE     FAILURE     OF 

SOCIETY   AND   THE   IMPOSSIBILITY   OF 

SOCIALISM 

"  Dieses  Prunkscliiff  ist  ein  rechtes  Inventarienstuck,  woran  man 
sehen  kann,  "was  die  Venetianer  waren,  und  sich  zu  sein  diinkten." 

Goethe  :  "  Italianische  Reise." 


But  if  Absolute  Poverty  is  less  worshipful  than  St. 
Francis  imagined,  Magnificence  as  an  ideal  will,  I  fear, 
always  be  found  to  connote  defective  moral  sympathies, 
as  of  the  Pharaohs  building  their  treasure-cities  on  the 
labour  of  lashed  slaves.  For  how  in  our  world  of  sorrow 
and  mystery  can  magnanimity  and  magnificence  meet  ? 
What  great  soul  could  find  expression  in  gilt,  or  even  in 
gold  ?  'Tis  a  reflection  on  the  character  of  the  Doges  of 
Venice  that  everywhere  in  their  palace  is  a  sense  of  over- 
gilded ceilings.  Even  when  the  Masters  have  made  a 
firmament  of  frescoes,  the  massive  flamboyant  framing 
weighs  like  a  torrid  haze  on  a  weary  land.  Art  is  over- 
laid and  obliterated  by  gold.  What  wonder  Religion  too 
is  soon  asphyxiated  in  these  flaming  halls  of  Council  — 
the  Doge  ceases  to  kneel  to  the  Madonna,  he  stands  before 
Venice  Unthroned  between  Mars  and  Neptune.  It  is  Juno 
who  from  a  ceiling-fresco  pours  gold  on  Venice,  and  in 
the  heavy  gilded  picture  of  Zelotti,  the  Magnificent  Ten 
could  behold  Venice  Seated  on  the  World.  What  sly 
satirist  was  it  who  —  over  the  choir  of  St.  Mark's  — 
crucified  Christ  on  a  cross  of  gold  ? 

In  "  The  Merchant  of  Venice,"  'tis  the  Duke  of  Morocco 

176 


THE  GAY  DOGES  177 

who  chooses  the  golden  casket ;  I  feel  sure  'twas  Bassanio, 
the  Venetian.  Not  that  I  do  not  hate  the  leaden  casket 
more.  Portia  should  have  gone  with  a  field  of  buttercups 
in  June. 

Of  all  expressions  of  human  greatness,  metallic  sheen 
is  the  most  banal.  I  have  never  recovered  from  the 
shock  of  learning  that  the  Greeks  gilded  their  temples, 
and  though  I  can  now  with  even  a  spice  of  zest  imagine 
them  shining  afar  from  their  headlands  in  a  golden  glory, 
I  would  have  preferred  to  keep  my  vision  of  austere 
columns  and  noble  pediments ;  and  I  am  grateful  to 
Time,  that  truer  artist,  for  having  refined  away  that 
assertive  aureola. 

On  the  water,  indeed  —  which  is  beneath  one's  feet,  and 
not  sagging  on  one's  head  —  metallic  sheen  may  exhilarate, 
subtilising  and  softening  itself,  as  it  does,  in  its  own  wa- 
vering reflections,  and  I  find  the  Doge's  gilded  galley 
more  endurable  than  his  lacunar  aureum.  It  may  be 
because  Shakespeare  (or  rather  Plutarch)  has  reconciled 
me  to  Cleopatra's  barge  by  those  magnificent  burnished 
lines.  The  Lord  Mayor  of  London,  too,  had  anciently 
his  gilded  barge,  and  if  you  will  look  at  an  eighteenth- 
century  picture  in  the  Guildhall  by  a  pair  of  forgotten 
painters,  representing  the  Lord  of  Cockaigne  sailing  in 
state  on  the  Thames  on  the  ninth  of  November,  on  the 
way  to  be  sworn  at  Westminster,  you  will  see  how  easily 
London,  with  her  old  boatmen  and  barges,  and  water- 
gates  and  water-parties,  singing  as  in  Pepys,  might  have 
paralleled  the  water-pomp  of  Venice,  and  how  completely 
we  have  now  thrown  away  the  gorgeous  possibilities  of 
our  proud  water-way,  lining  it  with  warehouses  in  lieu  of 
stately  mansions,  and  cutting  out  of  our  lives  all  that 
shimmering  vitality  of  ever-moving  water.  Man  does 
not  live  by  bread  alone,  and  "  Give  us  this  day  our  daily 
water "  were  no  unfitting  prayer  in  our  arid  city.  The 
Henley   Week   is   our   one   approach  to  the  colour  of  a 


178  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

Venetian  festa.  Yet  what  a  Grand  Canal  the  Thames 
niisrht  have  been  !  I  vow  that  at  a  distance  I  should  take 
that  old  Guildhall  picture,  with  its  gay  old  costumes,  its 
pageant  of  gilded  galleys,  each  flying  a  brave  array  of 
rich-dyed  flags,  and  manned  with  rowers  in  white  ;  its 
spires  and  turrets,  and  the  noble  dome  of  St.  Paul's  swell- 
ing into  sunny  spaces  of  air  and  cloud,  all  suffused  in  a 
golden  mellowness,  to  represent  the  Doge  of  Venice  going 
to  a  "  solemn  rite  "  at  the  Salute.  Alas  !  the  Lord  Mayor 
has  now  only  a  gilded  coach,  and  the  Doge  of  Venice 
has  vanished  away,  and  only  fragments  of  galleys  in  the 
Arsenal  and  a  model  of  the  last  of  the  Bucentaurs  remain 
to  tell  the  tale  of  his  marine  glories,  and  his  marriage  to 
the  Adriatic  on  Ascension  Day. 

One  mast  of  the  Bucentoro  —  the  very  mast  that  upbore 
the  flag  of  the  winged  lion  and  the  proud  inscription.  In 
hoc  signo  vinces  —  survives  in  tragic  recumbency,  while  a 
morsel  of  frieze  shows  in  gold,  on  a  basis  of  dark  wood, 
delicious  angels  playing  trumpet  and  harp  at  the  prow. 
The  relics  of  other  galleys,  pranked  with  figures  about 
half  life-size,  enable  us  to  gather  what  exuberance  of 
fancy  and  grotesquerie  went  to  grace  the  Bucentoro  which 
Napoleon  burnt,  while  the  fact  that  he  extracted  the  gold 
of  80,000  Napoleons  from  its  aslies  shows  with  what  pro- 
digality the  Republic  blazoned  its  sense  of  itself. 

But  the  marvellous  model  reconstructed  by  Ferdinand 
of  Austria  in  1837  at  a  cost  of  152,000  francs,  reveals,  if 
it  be  exact,  that  seamy  side  which  is  always  the  obverse 
of  Magnificence.  At  first  the  eye  is  taken  up  with  its 
opulence  of  decoration,  as  it  seems  to  take  the  water  with 
its  proud  keel,  and  its  great  all-topping  flag  of  the  lion 
and  the  cross.  For  its  upper  deck  is  of  mosaic,  over- 
hinged  by  a  huge  lid,  red  velvet  without  and  gold  relief 
within,  and  from  the  water-line  rise  winged  figures,  and 
over  tlie  arch  through  which  pass  the  many-flashing  oars  of 
red  and  gold  is  a  frieze  of  flying  horses,  the  rape  of  Eu- 


THE  GAY  DOGES  179 

ropa,  Centaurs,  and  what  not ;  and  above  this  are  winged 
figures  flying  towards  a  gold  sky,  and  gold  figures  on 
a  balcony,  which  is  supported  at  the  prow  by  winged 
lions  and  a  pair  of  mermen,  and  at  the  bowsprit  couches 
the  winged  lion  with  two  little  angels  playing  behind  him  ; 
and  on  the  hull  is  a  naiad  pouring  out  her  urn,  and  a  mer- 
man blowing  his  trumpet,  and  the  protrusive  heads  of  alli- 
gators ;  and  lest  you  should  think  Venice  meant  nothing 
but  gold  and  fantasy  and  the  pride  of  life,  behold  domi- 
nant over  these  Justice  with  her  sword  and  her  scales, 
and  Peace  with  her  dove  and  her  olive-branch. 

But  below,  hidden  away  behind  and  beneath  the  gild- 
ing, at  the  unseen  end  of  the  red  and  gold  oars 

"  Which  to  the  tune  of  flutes  kept  stroke," 

sat  one  hundred  and  seventy -eight  galley-slaves,  chained 
four  to  an  oar ;  and  here  in  this  fuscous  interior  the 
benches  are  no  longer  of  plush,  but  of  rough  deal ;  here 
is  no  play  of  Fancy  —  here  in  the  hard  seats  we  touch 
Reality.  But  not  herein  lies  the  supreme  sordidness  of 
the  Bucentoro  —  the  crowning  touch  is  given  by  the  oars, 
which,  at  the  very  point  where  they  disappear  over  the 
rowlocks  under  the  gay  arches,  turn  from  their  red  and 
gold  into  a  plain  dirty  white,  like  shirt-cuffs  that  give  on 
soiled  sleeves.  'Tis  the  very  magnificence  of  meanness ! 
The  horny-handed  wretches,  to  the  rhythm  of  whose  tired 
muscles  this  golden  vessel  moved  along  in  its  music  and 
sunshine,  to  whose  caged  gloom  no  glimpse  came  of  the 
flags  and  the  purple,  the  angels  and  the  naiads,  could  not 
even  be  conceded  the  coloured  end  of  an  oar.  But  could 
there  be  an  apter  symbol  of  civilisation,  ancient,  mediaeval 
or  modern,  than  this  gilded  oar,  whose  gaudiness  fades  as 
it  passes  from  the  bravery  of  the  outer  spectacle  to  the 
grimnessof  the  inner  labour?  Upon  such  sweating  slaves 
rested  all  the  glitter  and  pageantry  of  the  ancient  world 
—  not  only  Babylon  and  Carthage,  but  even  the  spiritual 


180  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

and  artistic  greatness  of  Greece.  In  hoc  signo  vinces  —  in 
the  sign  of  slavery ;  in  the  sign  of  the  lion  and  the  cross 
—  the  lion  for  yourself  and  the  cross  for  the  people.  And 
in  every  land  of  to-day  the  same  State-Galley  glides  along 
in  bannered  pomp,  parading  its  decorative  images  of  Peace 
and  Justice,  and  the  radiant  creations  of  its  Art,  while  be- 
low are  the  hard  bare  benches  and  the  labouring,  groan- 
ing serfs.  The  serfs  are  below,  even  in  another  sense,  for 
it  is  their  unsightly  hands  that  have  built  up  every  square 
inch  of  this  splendour.  Beatrice  d'Este  went  to  see  a 
galley  a-building,  her  velvet  cap  and  her  embroidered 
vest  stuck  full  of  jewels ;  complacently  recording  the 
ejaculations  of  admiration  for  her  diamonds  and  rubies, 
while  the  Venetian  women,  and  even  children,  were  toil- 
ing at  making  the  sails  and  the  ropes.  Yes,  the  social 
order  too  must  be  gazetted  bankrupt.  It  has,  indeed, 
never  been  solvent.  It  has  never  paid  its  real  cred- 
itors, the  slaves  of  the  uncoloured  oar. 

Nor  does  our  civilization  hold  much  hope  of  a  change 
for  the  fairer.  Despite  prophets  and  poets,  despite  Social- 
ists, dryasdust  or  dithyrambic,  despite  philanthropists 
and  preachers,  the  revel  on  the  top-deck  amid  the  velvet 
and  the  mosaics  grows  ever  wilder,  the  flutes  ever  more 
Dionysiac,  the  fantasies  on  prow  and  poop  ever  more  gro- 
tesquely golden.  America,  shorn  of  monarchy  and  feudal- 
ism and  rank,  and  all  that  the  friends  of  man  screamed 
against,  divides  with  Russia  the  hegemony  of  hotels  and 
outdoes  the  worst  extravagances  and  debaucheries  of  the 
Renaissance.  Where  in  the  Cinquecento  a  few  despots 
and  "  humanists "  wallowed  in  lust  and  luxury,  we  have 
now  ten  thousand  private  tyrants  and  loose-livers,  re- 
strained hardly  by  the  penal  law.  The  deeds  of  the 
Cenci  or  the  Baglioni  must  be  done  in  a  glass-house  in 
the  fierce  light  that  beats  upon  local  greatness.  The 
ruffians  of  the  Renaissance  had  no  such  free  field  for 
vagaries  and  vices  as  the  vagrom  son  of  a  millionaire  en- 


THE  GAY  DOGES  181 

joys  in  this  modern  world,  where  property  in  growing 
fluid  has  become  dissolved  from  duty;  where  in  every 
pleasure-city  palaces  invite  and  women  allure  and  slaves 
grovel;  where  every  port  swarms  with  white-winged  yachts 
to  bear  his  indolent  irresponsibility  to  glamorous  shores  ; 
where  in  a  million  halls  of  light  his  world-strewn  flunkeys 
proffer  unseasonable  food  cooked  by  unsurpassable  artists, 
and  rare  champagnes,  oscillated  for  months  in  a  strange 
daily  ritual  by  troops  of  underground  elves. 

They  tell  us  that  this  New  Year's  Eve  in  New  York 
alone  some  three  million  pounds  were  spent  in  suppers  in 
the  flaring  restaurants,  where  between  eleven  and  twelve 
o'clock  only  champagne  could  be  served.  Such  is  the 
New  Era  ushered  in  by  the  New  World  —  the  Era  of- 
Champagne.  For  this  the  Red  Indian  was  uprooted  and 
the  wilderness  tamed.  For  this  Washington  lived  and 
Lincoln  died.  By  the  flood  of  champagne  all  standards  of 
life  and  letters  are  swept  away,  save  the  one  standard  of 
financial  success,  save  the  ability  to  dine  in  that  wonderful 
culinary  cathedral  where  in  a  dim  irreligious  light  as  of  a 
submarine  world  of  faery,  to  a  melting  liturgical  music,  a 
fashionable  congregation  follows  with  absorbing  zeal  the 
lengthy  order  of  service.     What  an  Agapemone! 

And  this  epidemic  of  vulgarity,  spreading  to  our  own 
country,  has  made  the  England  of  1802,  which  Words- 
worth denounced  for  "  glittering  like  a  brook,"  the 
England  where  "  plain  living  and  high  thinking "  were 
no  more,  appear  like  an  island  of  pristine  simplicity. 
Even  the  old  families  surrender  to  the  new  standard  and 
—  in  the  plaint  of  Dante — "  wori  heroico  more^  sed  plebeo 
sequuntur  superhiam.^^ 

What  is  to  be  done  ?  What  is  to  be  done  about  it  all  ? 
We  writing  men,  to  whom  the  highest  British  manhood  is 
still  Wordsworth  in  that  country  cottage  where  visitors 
must  pay  for  anything  beyond  bread  and  cheese,  we  to 
whom  the   greatest   American  personality  is   still  Walt 


182  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

"Whitman  in  his  Camden  shanty,  must  at  least  preserve  our 
divine  gift  of  laughter,  our  one  poor  power  of  laughing  at 
these  vulgarians,  whom  even  the  occasional  smuggling  of 
an  Old  Master  out  of  Italy  cannot  redeem  from  barbarism. 

The  purple  pomp  of  kings,  blatant  though  it  be  in 
comparison  with  true  grandeur,  is  at  least  the  expression 
of  a  public  dignity  :  it  is  an  official  costume  like  the 
judge's  wig  and  gown.  But  because  greatness  must  accept 
office  at  the  hands  of  its  otherwise  helpless  inferiors,  and 
office  must  be  suitably  apparelled,  a  certain  confusion  has 
been  established  between  splendour  and  greatness,  as 
though  because  greatness  means  splendour,  splendour 
must  mean  greatness.  Of  this  confusion  those  are  prompt- 
est to  take  advantage  to  whom  the  high  road  to  considera- 
tion is  closed.  Private  pomp  is  a  confession  of  personal 
pettiness.  The  little  soul  must  needs  inflate  itself  by  a 
great  house-shell,  and  protract  itself  by  a  long  retinue  of 
servants.  'Tis  almost  too  pathetic  a  meekness,  this  humil- 
ity of  the  Magnificent  Ones. 

Cannot  I  breathe  into  you — O  Magnificent  Ones — a 
little  proper  pride  ?  Ye  buy  the  Past,  watching  one 
another  in  jealous  competition ;  will  no  one  buy  the 
Future  ?  Why  not  buy  with  your  millions  an  earth 
renewed  and  regenerated,  a  solvent  social  order  ?  Why 
not  build  a  true  civilisation  on  this  malarious  marsh,  that 
shall  rise  like  the  spires  and  domes  of  Venice  from  her 
swamps  ?  Surely  that  were  a  dream  worthy  of  Magnifi- 
cence I  Come,  let  us  build  together  a  State-Galley  where 
the  oars  shall  be  red  and  gold  from  blade  to  handle,  and 
every  man  shall  take  his  turn  at  them,  and  the  fantasies  of 
Art  shall  adorn  the  hull  of  Righteousness,  and  Justice  and 
Peace  shall  no  longer  be  ironic  images  carved  for  the 
complacency  of  the  top-deck.  So  shall  there  dawn  an 
Ascension  Day  on  which  the  Doge  shall  go  out  with 
banners  and  music,  not  to  marry  the  sea  with  a  ring,  but 
to  celebrate  the  nuptials  of  Earth  with  Heaven. 


THE   GAY  DOGES  183 

Private  pomp  is  surely  a  questionable  thing.  Mediaeval 
life  centred  round  the  Cathedral,  the  Castle,  the  Palace. 
And  the  masses  touched  the  life  at  each  and  all.  The 
Cathedral  gave  them  their  religion,  their  laws  came  from 
the  Palace,  their  protection  from  the  Castle.  Dominating 
a  feudal  population,  the  towers  of  law  and  war  uplifted 
and  unified  the  people.  The  lowliest  were  of  this  greatness. 
To-day  palaces  flaunt  themselves,  divorced  from  moral 
meaning,  magnificence  without  significance.  The  world, 
as  I  said,  is  full  of  private  autocrats,  without  duties  or 
dangers  :  an  unhappy  consequence  of  the  fall  of  feudalism, 
ere  a  system  as  human  was  ready  to  replace  it.  And  to- 
day the  Cathedral  is  our  one  feudal  relic,  reconciling 
magnificence  with  morality  :  the  light  streaming  through 
the  rose-window  haloes  the  grey  head  of  the  market-woman, 
and  her  prayer  equals  that  of  the  Magnificent  One  himself. 
It  is  significant  that  no  villa  —  whoever  the  architect  — ■ 
can  attain  the  poetic  quality  of  the  simplest  village  church. 
The  palace  of  Moses  is  nowhere  mentioned,  but  we  read 
many  minute  instructions  concerning  the  Tabernacle  and 
the  Temple.  In  truth,  art  treasures  are  essentially  public: 
the  furniture  of  cathedrals,  libraries,  law-courts,  market- 
places, and  parks.  The  owners  of  collections  do  indeed 
often  allow  the  public  to  visit  them  at  inconvenient  times, 
but  that  anybody  should  have  exclusive  rights  is  an  ab- 
surdity. If  Art  were  a  form  of  property  like  any  other, 
the  owner  could  destroy  it,  and  the  righteous  indignation 
of  the  world  at  the  destruction  of  a  Botticelli  or  a  Velasquez 
would  mark  the  boundaries  of  private  property.  Land 
comes  under  the  same  canon.  Nothing,  perhaps,  should 
be  owned  which  might  not  be  destroyed  at  will. 

In  literature  and  music  —  which  are  more  spirits  than 
bodies,  and  which  can  be  multiplied  without  loss  — monop- 
olies are  unnecessary.  If  I  write  a  book  against  Social- 
ism, the  world  will  applaud,  and  communistically  possess 
itself  thereof  after  a  brief  term.    And  this  legal  limitation 


184  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

of  copyright  which  forcibly  wrests  epics,  operas,  and 
novels  from  the  heirs  might  be  extended  to  pictures  and 
statues. 

II 

But  if  the  galley  of  old  Venice  stimulates  my  Social- 
ism, the  cinematograph  of  modern  Venice  torpifies  it 
again.  For  be  it  known  that  in  Venice  there  are  scores 
of  halls  and  theatres  devoted  to  delectable  visions  at  prices 
to  suit  the  poorest,  and  open  to  ragazzi  for  a  couple  of 
soldi.  And  in  every  city  of  Italy  the  fever  rages  ;  one 
performance  follows  on  the  heels  of  another,  and  the 
wretched  manipulator  of  the  magic  lantern  must  subsist 
on  sandwiches  while  the  theatre  is  clearing  and  re-filling. 
Every  unlet  dancing-hall  or  decayed  rink  or  bankrupt 
building  has  blossomed  out  into  a  hall  of  enchantment 
where  even  the  words  of  the  play  are  sometimes  given  by 
the  cunning  juxtaposition  of  gramophones.  In  this  way  I 
heard  "Amletto,  or  the  Prince  of  Denmark,"  its  too,  too  solid 
flesh  melted  into  a  meat  extract.  But  the  most  wonderful 
spectacle  of  all  was  soundless,  save  for  the  flowing  music. 
For  twenty  centesimi  the  Teatro  S.  Marco  passed  before 
my  eyes  an  exquisite  vision  of  JLe  Ore  —  the  hours  in  ten 
"  Quadri  animati"  from  the  shiver  of  light  that  precedes 
tlie  dawn  to  the  last  falling  of  night.  In  the  Sala  d'Aurora 
of  the  Castle  of  Ferrara,  Dosso  Dossi  has  depicted  Tramonto, 
Notte,  L' Aurora^  and  Mezzogiorno^  but  not  more  poetically 
than  the  modern  stage-manager  who  arranged  these  living 
pictures.  As  I  watched  these  allegorical  groupings  of 
nymphs  and  fauns  by  their  stream  in  the  glade,  I  felt  that 
the  old  Pagan  religion  still  lingered  in  the  souls  that  could 
conceive  and  enjoy  this  nature-poetry. 

And  as  I  sat  here,  amid  Venetian  washerwomen  and 
street  boys,  it  was  further  borne  in  upon  me  that  no  State 
Bureau  would  ever  have  begotten  this  marvel  for  the  joy 
and  uplifting  of  the  people,  and  that  in  the  present  imper- 


THE  GAY  DOGES  185 

fection  of  human  nature,  individual  initiative  under  the 
spur  of  gold  or  hunger  could  alone  work  these  miracles  of 
Socialism.  "  La  propriete  c'est  la  vol,'"  said  Proudhon,  but 
"  vol "  in  his  sense  implies  a  bullish  acceptance  of  the 
very  conception  he  is  combating.  Let  us  translate  it  by 
"flight."     Property  is  the  impulse  of  the  aeroplane. 

Therefore  pray  do  not  count  my  aspiration  for  a  solvent 
social  order  as  an  adhesion  to  an}^  cut  and  dried  theory  of 
the  State  owning  and  administering  all  social  resources. 
For  that  sort  of  Socialism  is —  like  science  —  bankrupt, 
even  before  it  begins.  It  fails,  not  merely  because  it 
would  substitute  an  external  arrangement  for  a  change  of 
heart  —  and  Socialism  will  either  be  a  religion  or  will  not  be 
—  but  because  no  external  arrangement  is  possible.  The 
collective  ownership  of  land  and  capital  is  feasible  in  Juan 
Fernandez  so  long  as  Robinson  Crusoe  and  Friday  con- 
tinue exiled  from  civilisation,  but  impossible  in  our  world 
of  international  finance,  where  private  ownership  extends 
to  countries  which  the  property  holder  will  never  even 
visit.  Unless,  therefore,  every  country  in  the  world  sim- 
ultaneously adopted  Socialism,  there  would  be  an  inex- 
tricable tangle  of  Socialism  and  Individualism.  Not  to 
mention  that  capital  —  as  every  shareholder  knows  — 
means  men  as  much  as  money.  But  even  in  Juan  Fer- 
nandez, as  soon  as  it  became  thickly  populated.  Socialism 
would  be  unmanageable,  because  the  stock  of  concentrable 
human  consciousness  is  insufficient  to  arrange  a  social 
order  from  a  central  bureau.  Omniscience  alone  would 
be  equal  to  the  task,  not  to  mention  All  Goodness  and 
All  Wisdom.  Despite  the  vast  loss  by  friction  and  ab- 
sence of  organisation,  despite  the  vast  suffering,  the  strug- 
gle for  existence  is  the  only  agency  capable  of  fitting 
the  pegs  into  the  holes.  Shall  the  State,  for  example, 
select  which  man  shall  write  poetry  ?  And  still  more 
vital,  which  poetry  the  State  Press  shall  print?  We 
have  already  had  experience  of  the  State  as  a  selector  of 


186  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

Laureates  and  a  censor  of  drama,  and  ]\Iilton  knew  it  as  a 
censor  of  literature.  Our  most  brilliant  Socialists,  an 
they  had  their  way,  would  be  reduced  to  pasting  pas- 
quinades on  the  pedestals  of  our  street  statues. 

But  in  a  looser  connotation,  "  we  are  all  Socialists  now," 
if  indeed  we  ever  were  anything  else.  From  the  day  of 
the  first  human  grouping  for  co-operation  and  common 
defence,  Socialism  has  been  the  rule  of  life,  and  the  ques- 
tion of  how  the  common  work  and  the  common  products 
are  to  be  apportioned  is  a  mere  question  of  organised  dis- 
tribution. That  we  have  hitherto  left  this  cumbrous  and 
infinitely  complex  problem  of  distribution  to  solve  itself 
by  natural  selection  does  not  make  society  less  socialistic. 
Nor  would  the  discovery  of  a  more  excellent  way  of  divid- 
ing up  the  labour  and  its  results  make  society  more  social- 
istic. For  compared  with  the  assets  of  civilisation  in 
which  we  share  equally  —  the  museums,  picture  galleries, 
libraries,  parks,  roads,  schools,  life- boat  and  fire-engine 
services,  armies,  navies,  light-houses,  weather-bureaus,  asy- 
lums, hospitals,  observatories  —  the  assets  in  which  we 
share  unequally  are  relatively  unimportant,  and  without 
sacrificing  to  a  machine  the  zest  and  stimulus  of  liberty,  and 
the  fine  flavour  of  individuality,  it  is  a  comparatively  simple 
matter  to  minimise  the  waste  and  suffering  produced  by 
the  struggle  for  existence,  and  to  arrange  that  talent 
shall  rise  to  the  top,  not  for  its  sake  but  our  own.  It  is 
no  evil  that  one  man  should  live  in  a  palace  and  another 
in  a  cottage ;  these  differences  even  add  to  the  colour  and 
joy  of  life.  The  evil  is  solely  that  any  man  willing  to 
work  should  lack  a  cottage,  or  that  the  cottage  should  be 
a  malarious  hovel.  Levelling  up  is  the  only  reform  nec- 
essary, as  it  is  the  only  reform  possible.  For  if  tlie  grad- 
ual consolidation  of  railways,  land,  mines,  and  a  few 
leading  industries  in  the  hands  of  the  State  is  not  beyond 
practical  politics,  this  would  still  be  very  far  from  "  So- 
cialism," and  it  is  vastly  amusing  to  witness  the  agony  of 


THE   GAY  DOGES  187 

apprehension  with  which  respectable  society  looks  forward 
to  the  advent  of  a  social  order  which  cannot  possibly  ma- 
terialise, and  which  menaces  us  less  than  the  flaming  tail 
of  a  comet.  Only  less  amusing  is  the  awe  with  which  so- 
ciety regards  Property  as  something  sacrosanct  in  quality 
and  immutable  in  quantity.  Why,  even  the  King's  shil- 
ling is  as  nimble  and  elusive  as  mercury,  will  buy  you 
mutton  to-day  and  only  tripe  to-morrow,  and  scarcely  run 
to  dog-sausage  in  a  siege.  Property  is  a  Proteus,  a  shadow, 
a  transient  and  generally  embarrassed  phantom.  Prop- 
erty merely  means  a  potential  call  upon  human  service  — 
past  or  future  —  and  if  human  service  is  unwilling  or  absent, 
Property  shrinks  or  collapses,  like  the  bag  of  pearls  found 
by  the  thirsting  Arab  in  the  desert.  Finance  —  like  all 
other  branches  of  science  —  has  been  treated  as  though  its 
subject-matter  had  absolute  existence.  But  the  assets  of 
the  world's  bankers  incalculably  outrun  the  world's  power 
of  service,  and  Property  is  merely  a  promissory  note  wliich 
can  only  be  redeemed  if  there  is  not  too  great  a  run  upon 
the  labour  bank  at  which  it  is  presented.  Still  more  elas- 
tic is  the  service  that  produces  this  right  to  call  upon  the 
service  of  others.  A  hundred  thousand  readers  buy  this 
book  —  instead  of  borrowing  it  —  and  I  am  a  Croesus  ;  a 
hundred,  and  I  am  free  of  income  tax.  Motor  cars  are 
invented,  and  my  house  in  Ascot  falls  to  half  its  former 
value  because  the  smart  set  need  no  longer  stay  overnight 
during  the  Ascot  week.  My  unknown  aunt  remembers 
me  in  her  will  and  I  am  a  thousand  pounds  the  richer. 
The  Seine  rises  and  my  Paris  flat  is  a  ruin.  I  die  and  my 
land  dwindles  to  six  feet.  Where  in  this  foolish  flux  is 
room  for  holiness?  And  why  may  not  society — the  only 
source  of  values — mould  Property  as  it  will  for  society's 
ends?  Why  —  among  the  many  vicissitudes  with  which 
Property  must  reckon  —  should  not  social  reform  count 
equally  with  bad  harvests,  wars  of  conquest,  and  Stock 
Exchange  manoeuvres  ? 


188  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

To  say  that  Property  is  sacred  is  to  confuse  the  means 
with  the  end,  like  the  miser  who  hoards  his  gold  and  for- 
gets its  uses.  Society  is  sacred,  not  Property,  and  what- 
ever sanctitude  or  stability  has  been  attached  to  Property 
has  been  attached  entirely  for  socialistic  purposes;  not 
that  the  individual  may  be  enriched,  but  that  he  may 
not  lose  the  spur  that  drives  him  to  enrich  society. 
Individual  property  is  merely  a  by-product  of  labour  for 
society.  He  who  demands  overmuch  for  his  labour  is 
under-moralised.  The  true  citizen  is  anxious  to  be  taxed 
for  the  general  good,  provided  his  taxes  are  used  for 
social  service.  He  is  anxious  that  some  form  of  distribu- 
tion of  the  common  products  shall  be  organised  to  sup- 
plement natural  selection  and  correct  its  over-harshness. 
Experience  might  prove  that  interference  with  natural 
selection  saps  the  stamina  and  initiative  of  society  more 
than  it  benefits  the  "submerged  tenth,"  in  which  case  we 
should  reluctantly  return  to  the  present  form  of  Socialism. 

As  for  land,  it  is  the  one  thing  that  I  can  conceive 
nationalised  even  under  our  present  form  of  Socialism, 
nay,  which  is  already  nationalised  to  the  extent  that  the 
private  owners  of  British  land  may  not  sell  it  to  Germany 
or  Japan,  as  they  may  sell  anything  else  of  theirs.  Every 
new  State  should  doubtless  begin  by  trying  to  nationalise 
its  land.  I  say  "  trying,"  because  it  is  by  no  means  cer- 
tain that  it  would  succeed,  since  so  far  from  the  increment 
in  land  values  being  unearned,  it  is  the  very  possibility  of 
earning  it  that  induces  the  pioneer  to  suffer  peril,  privation, 
and  isolation.  Were  Canada,  for  example,  not  to  give 
away  its  land,  the  many  adventurers  who  have  flowed  in 
from  the  United  States  would  probably  have  remained  at 
home,  and  all  this  Canadian  territory  have  been  still 
empty.  And  once  you  have  made  land  quasi-private 
property,  it  cannot  justly  be  subjected  to  any  peculiar 
tax,  since  colossal  as  is  the  rise  of  land  values  in  growing 
towns,  the  value  of  land  is  controlled  by  the  same  factors 


THE  GAY  DOGES  189 

of  luck  and  judgment  as  rule  all  other  property  values, 
and  may  be  depreciated  as  well  as  enhanced  by  the  opera- 
tion of  social  forces  beyond  the  owner's  control  or  provi- 
sion. Wherefore  all  increments  in  value  —  in  stocks  and 
shares,  copyrights,  patents,  &c.,  &c.  —  should  be  treated 
as  potential  matter  for  taxation  equally  with  the  so-called 
"unearned  increment"  on  land. 

One  would  imagine  from  the  war  cries  in  our  latest 
political  campaign  that  Socialism  was  already  upon  us, 
and  that  the  only  refuge  from  it  lay  in  Tariff  Reform. 
But  it  is  precisely  Tariff  Reform  which  is  Socialism ;  a 
taxation  of  the  entire  community  in  the  interests  of  this 
or  that  industry.  Nor  should  the  entire  community  be 
averse  from  taxation  for  any  provably  good  object ;  a 
moralised  community  would  even  be  always  looking  round 
for  fresh  methods  of  self-taxation.  Budget  Day  would 
be  a  national  festival,  a  day  of  solemn  joy,  tense  with  the 
hope  that  new  ways  would  be  found  of  making  England 
the  Kingdom  of  God.  Alas  I  it  is  a  day  of  sick  anxiety, 
with  a  sequel  of  farcical  unfailingness,  in  which  every 
section  taxed  sends  a  deputation  to  show  that  it  is  the  one 
section  that  should  have  been  left  unburdened,  while  from 
the  bloated  gluttons  and  swillers  at  the  great  hotels  arises 
the  cry  of  "  Red  ruin  and  the  breaking-up  of  laws."  And 
the  poor  philanthropist  we  have  always  with  us — he  who 
threatens  to  stop  his  charity  contributions.  As  if  the 
abolition  of  charity  was  not  the  very  object  of  social  re- 
form !  Every  benevolent  activity  means  a  sore  in  the 
social  system,  and  charity  covers  indeed  a  multitude  of 
our  sins. 

Strange  that  these  sordid  questions  of  money  should  so 
fever  this  mighty  England  of  Shakespeare  and  Milton. 
Ship-money  cost  Charles  the  First  his  head,  and  a  petty 
land  tax  changes  the  House  of  Peers.  Poor  humanity, 
so  deluded  as  to  the  essential  values  of  life,  so  peculiarly 
demented  in  all  that  concerns  Property !     But  I  bid  you  cast 


190  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

away  your  fears.  I  repeat  to  you  my  good  tidings  of  great 
joy.  Socialism  is  impossible.  A  perfect  and  just  distri- 
bution of  the  goods  and  labours  of  life  —  "  to  each  accord- 
ing to  his  needs,  from  each  according  to  his  powers  "  —  is 
Utopian.  Moreover  envy,  luitred,  and  all  uncharitableness 
prevent  it :  stupidity,  sloth,  selfishness,  treachery,  and 
tyranny  preclude  it.  Rejoice,  therefore,  and  let  us  cry 
Hosannal 

Nor  are  these  evil  qualities  confined  to  the  capitalist, 
they  are  found  in  even  uglier  forms  in  the  working  man, 
who  is  merel}^  a  capitalist  without  means,  and  through  his 
Trade  Unions  talks  equally  of  rights  and  even  less  of 
duties  and  ideals. 

But  if  Socialism  is  impossible,  and  Socialist  parties  con- 
sequently deficient  in  constructive  potency,  they  yet  per- 
form in  every  country  a  critical  and  regulative  function  of 
the  first  importance.  Our  own  Labour  members  are  the 
only  gentlemen  in  British  politics.  To  all  questions, 
national  or  international,  they  bring  a  broad  spirit  and  a 
Quixotic  ideal,  and  while  our  Howards  and  our  Percys 
cower  in  craven  terror  of  Germany,  or  make  prudent  al- 
liance with  Holy  Russia,  or  handle  with  correlative  des- 
potism India,  Ireland  or  the  woman  question,  our  men 
from  the  pits  and  the  factories  sit  free  and  fearless,  the 
sole  guardians  of  England's  ancient  glory. 


THE    SUPERMAN   OF   LETTERS:    OR   THE 
HYPOCRISY    OF   POLITICS 

AuRESTiVE  was  it  in  an  aisle  of  Santa  Croce — the  Floren- 
tine Church  of  the  Holy  Cross  —  to  come  upon  a  monu- 
ment toNiccolo  Machiavelli,  anathema  alike  for  Catholicism 
and  Protestantism,  the  "Old  Nick"  of  the  Hudibras 
rhyme.  'Tvvas  as  if  Mephisto  had  managed  not  only  to 
slip  into  the  Cathedral,  but  to  achieve  canonisation.  But 
even  a  devil  is  not  given  his  due  at  the  hands  of  his  own 
countrymen  :  it  was  reserved  for  an  English  earl,  more 
than  two  and  a  half  centuries  after  Mephisto's  passing,  to 
provide  his  works  with  a  splendid  setting  and  his  remains 
with  a  massive  monument.  And  so,  in  the  dim  religious 
light,  I  pondered  over  the  stately  inscription  : 

"  Tanto  Nomini  nullum  par  Elogium." 

How,  indeed,  equate  eulogy  to  so  great  a  name  ?  Ma- 
chiavelli was  our  first  modern — the  first  to  exhibit  the 
reign  of  law  in  human  affairs,  to  read  history  as  the  play 
of  human  forces  and  not  as  the  caprice  of  a  cloudy  Provi- 
dence, modified  by  the  stars.  What  an  epic  sweep  in  the 
opening  sentences  of  his  "  History  of  Florence"  —  Gibbon 
in  a  nut-shell,  the  whole  "  Decline  and  Fall,"  summarised 
as  the  economic  emigration  southward  of  the  surplus  popu- 
lation of  the  Goths  into  an  Italy  weakened  by  the  removal 
of  the  seat  of  Empire  to  Constantinople.  Vagarious 
chance,  indeed,  he  admits,  as  a  complication  (to  be  mini- 
mised by  prudence)  but  Providence  is  mentioned  in  "  The 
Prince,"  only  to  be  dropped,  and  astrology  is  not  even 
mentioned.  Machiavelli  would  have  agreed  that  "  the 
fault's  in  ourselves,  not  in  our  stars,  that  we  are  under- 

191 


192  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

lings,"  and  for  those  who  wished  to  prince  it,  he  was  pre- 
pared to  point  the  conditions  of  success.  And  this 
indifference  to  the  stars  —  to  quadrangles  and  hexagons, 
sigils,  conjunctions,  and  configurations — is  not  his  least 
amazing  merit. 

Pico  della  Mirandola  had,  indeed,  refuted  astrology 
before  him,  but  it  was  in  the  interests  of  that  conventional 
theory  of  Providence  and  free-will  which  leaves  the  chaos 
of  history  irreducible  to  order.  Machiavelli  not  only 
ignores  astrology,  but  substitutes  causation  for  the  chaos. 

'Tis  true  Corate  suggested  that  astrology  was,  likewise, 
an  attempt  to  reduce  to  law  the  chaos  of  human  phe- 
nomena, but  the  remark  is  over-ingenious.  Where  there  is 
no  rational  connection  between  causes  and  effects  there  is 
no  science.  The  planetary  conjuncture  one  was  born 
under  might,  indeed,  not  impossibly  affect  temperament 
or  internal  destiny,  just  as  the  climate  one  was  born  under, 
but  the  notion  that  it  could  shape  external  destiny  belongs 
to  the  medioeval  megalomania.  Galileo's  discovery  of 
new  stars  must  have  shaken  it,  falsifying  as  it  did  all 
previous  horoscopes  —  indeed.  Sir  Henry  Wotton,  our 
ambassador  to  Venice,  was  more  impressed  by  Galileo's  in- 
juriousness  to  astrology  than  to  theology.  "  For  the 
virtue  of  these  new  planets  must  needs  vary  the  judicial 
part,  and  why  may  there  not  yet  be  more  ? "  But 
Machiavelli  belongs  to  the  pre-telescope  period ;  he  wrote 
a  whole  century  before  Galileo,  and  thirty  years  ere 
Copernicus  unsettled  the  ancient  heavens  by  his  Nurem- 
berg treatise.  True,  even  in  the  twelfth  century,  Mai- 
raonides  had  denounced  astrology  as  "  a  disease,  not  a 
science,"  and  the  great  Jew's  letter  "  to  the  Men  of  Mar- 
seilles "  had  evoked  Papal  applause.  But  not  even  Popes 
could  arrest  the  disease.  A  century  before  Machiavelli 
was  born  Petrarch  poured  scorn  on  the  astrologers.  But 
the  mockeries  of  this  pioneer  of  humanism  did  not  save 
a  prince  of  the  Renaissance  like  Lodovico  from  employing 


THE  SUPERMAN  OF  LETTERS  193 

an  astrologer  advisory,  under  whose  calculations  he  went 
from  disaster  to  disaster.  There  were  even  Professors  of 
Astrology  at  the  Universities.  Bodin,  the  next  great 
political  philosopher  after  Machiavelli,  though  half  a 
century  later,  still  dallies  with  astrology,  still  coquets  with 
the  theory  of  a  connection  between  the  planetary  motions 
and  the  world's  history,  while  Copernicus  he  regards  as  a 
fantast  unworthy  of  serious  refutation. 

Earlier  in  the  sixteenth  century  Luther  had  denounced 
astrology  as  "  framed  by  the  devil,"  and  in  his  Table  Talk 
had  challenged  the  astrologers  to  answer  him  why  Esau 
and  Jacob,  who  were  "  born  together  of  one  father  and  one 
mother,  at  one  time  and  under  equal  planets "  were  yet 
"  wholly  of  contrary  natures,  kinds  and  morals."  Neverthe- 
less in  the  next  century,  Milton  in  "  Paradise  Regained " 
makes  Satan  predict  truly  to  Jesus  on  the  strength  of 

*'  what  the  stars, 
Voluminous  or  single  characters, 
In  their  conjunction  met," 

give  him  to  spell,  and  throughout  the  whole  seventeenth 
century,  as  "  Guy  Mannering  "  reminds  us,  nativities  con- 
tinued to  be  cast.  The  child's  horoscope  in  some  parts  of 
Europe  hung  side  by  side  with  his  baptismal  certificate. 
Even  to-day  such  phrases  as  "  Thank  your  lucky  stars," 
conserve  a  shadow  of  the  ancient  belief,  and  the  sidereal 
influence  survives  even  more  subtly  in  the  word  "consider." 
Through  such  banks  of  fog  pierces  the  searchlight  of  the 
great  Florentine,  it  turns  its  powerful  beam  even  upon 
Church  history.  The  Princes  of  ecclesiastical  principalities, 
he  remarks  drily,  are  the  only  ones  who  can  possess  States 
and  subjects  without  governing  and  defending  them,  but 
it  would  be  presumptuous  in  him  to  discuss  these  matters, 
as  they  are  under  the  superintendence  and  direction  of  an 
Almighty  Being,  whose  dispensations  are  beyond  our 
weak    understandings.     But    the    Church    has   likewise 


194  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

attained  temporal  power,  and  here  Mephisto  may  intrude 
without  blasphemy.  Secular  triumphs  demand  secular 
explanations.  One  is  reminded  of  the  dialogue  on  Julius 
II.  attributed  to  Erasmus.  Our  Mephisto  notes  grimly 
that  no  prophet  has  ever  succeeded  unless  backed  by  an 
armed  force.  Hence  the  collapse  of  "  brother  Jerome 
Savonarola  when  the  multitude  ceased  to  have  faith  in 
him."  In  short,  in  the  making  of  history  Might  and  Right 
are  partners. 

Not  in  the  exposition  of  this  commonplace  lay  Machia- 
velli's  offensiveness  for  his  contemporaries.  Had  he 
remained  the  passionless  observer  of  the  pitiful  human 
breed,  the  explicator  of  the  tangled  threads  of  history,  he 
would  have  been  acclaimed  as  a  moralist,  unveiling  with 
ruthless  hand  the  hypocrisies  of  princes.  What  changed 
angel  to  devil  was  that  instead  of  fulminating  against  the 
partnership  of  Might  and  Right,  he  found  that  only  by 
this  firm  could  history  be  made.  He  wrote  not  science 
but  art —  the  ars  usurpandi.  Not  only  had  the  Princes  of 
the  past  combined  Might  with  Right,  guile  with  goodness, 
but  whoso  wished  now  to  be  a  Prince  must  needs  go  and 
do  likewise.  The  ethics  springing  from  the  social  relations 
of  citizen  to  citizen  no  longer  holds  in  the  relation  of 
ruler  to  subjects. 

It  is  true  "  The  Prince  "  might  also  be  regarded  as  an 
elaborate  Swiftian  irony  —  a  negative  Pulcinellian  advice 
to  those  about  to  usurp  —  an  exposition  of  Princedom  as 
the  service  of  the  devil.  "  A  New  Prince  cannot  with  im- 
punity exercise  all  the  virtues,  because  his  own  self-preser- 
vation will  often  compel  him  to  violate  the  laws  of  charity, 
religion  and  humanity."  But  this  Swiftian  supposition 
does  not  tally  with  the  dedication  to  Lorenzo  de'  Medici 
and  his  overt  encouragement  to  the  Most  Magnificent  to 
seize  the  reins.  Machiavelli  plainly  believes  in  the  sense 
he  alleges  hidden  by  the  ancients  in  the  myth  of  Chiron 
the  Centaur,  who  was  the  educator  of  rulers  because  he 


THE  SUPERMAN   OF   LETTERS  195 

had  the  double  qualification  of  the  brute  and  the  man.  In 
high  politics  crimes  are  only  crimes  when  they  are  blunders. 
Unsuccessful  cruelty  is  unpardonable.  Wickedness  should 
be  pursued  with  an  economy  of  means  to  end  :  like  the 
causes  in  Occam's  canon,  crimes  should  not  be  multiplied 
prcBter  necessitatem.  Politics  is  a  sort  of  bee-keeping,  and 
the  master  of  the  hive  will  use  the  instincts  and  ethics  of 
the  little  creatures  for  his  own  purposes,  his  kindness  will 
be  as  cold-blooded  as  his  cruelty.  Thus,  some  three  and 
a  half  centuries  before  Nietzsche,  was  expounded  the 
doctrine  of  the  Superman,  the  splendid  blonde  beast  who 
had  passed  Jenseits  von  Gut  und  Bose.  "  The  despised 
virtues  of  patience  and  humility  have  abased  the  spirits 
of  men,  which  Pagan  principles  exalted."  It  is  in  such 
precisely  Nietzschean  terms  that  Sir  Thomas  Browne 
sums  up,  albeit  unapplausively,  "  the  judgment  of  Machia- 
vel."  But  as  a  treatise  on  apiculture,  "The  Prince"  is 
not  rigidly  scientific.  The  Superman,  alone  upon  his 
dizzy  height,  Diabolists  and  neo-Dionysians  as  yet  unborn 
to  cheer  him,  has  his  moments  of  human  weakness. 
Before  the  crimes  of  Agathocles  he  falters,  and  remarks 
with  delicious  gravity,  "  Still  it  must  not  be  called  virtue 
to  murder  one's  fellow-citizens  or  to  sacrifice  one's  friends, 
or  be  insensible  to  the  voice  of  faith,  pity  or  religion. 
These  qualities  may  lead  to  sovereignty  but  not  to  glory." 
And  there  is  a  more  general  apologia  in  the  concession 
that  the  times  are  out  of  joint  —  in  the  grim  Tacitean 
explanation  that  "  he  who  deviates  from  the  common 
course  of  practice,  and  endeavours  to  act  as  duty  dictates, 
necessarily  ensures  his  own  destruction."  Super-morality 
lapses  here  into  morality. 

Moreover,  Machiavelli  did  not  himself  play  the  Super- 
man. He  wrote  the  part  —  or  founded  it  on  Csesar 
Borgia  —  but  he  did  not  act  it.  The  Rubicon  'twixt 
thought  and  action  he  never  crossed.  His  own  morals 
appear    to    have    been   conventionally   excellent.      Like 


196  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

Helvetius,  who  traced  virtue  to  the  lowest  roots  of  self- 
interest,  he  was  of  a  rare  magnanimity.  As  a  scientific 
observer  he  advises  the  Tyrant,  if  he  cannot  live  in  the 
Republic  he  has  conquered,  to  destroy  it  root  and  branch, 
but  as  a  man  he  bore  torture  and  imprisonment  for  the 
cause  of  liberty.  Indeed,  in  his  later  years  something  of 
the  S(xva  indignatio  of  Swift  seems  to  have  possessed  his 
breast.  It  was  Napoleon  who  was  destined  to  incarnate 
the  maxims  of  Machiavelli,  though  on  a  far  grander  stage 
than  even  Casar  Borgia  ever  dreamed  of  :  it  was  Napoleon 
who  gave  the  greatest  performance  of  "The  Prince." 
And  by  a  hitherto  unnoted  coincidence  Napoleon  was 
born  exactly  three  centuries  after  Machiavelli.  Exactly 
three  hundred  years  (1469-1769)  divided  the  nativities 
of  the  Superman  of  Letters  and  the  Superman  of  Action 
—  'tis  almost  enough  to  revive  faith  in  the  potency  of 
planetary  conjunctures.  True,  Nietzsche  regards  Napo- 
leon as  but  "  half-Superman,"  the  other  half  being  beast, 
but  we  have  seen  that  the  bestial  portion  is  a  necessary 
factor  of  the  Machiavellian  Superman,  who  is  nothing  if 
not  super-dominant.  What  Nietzsche's  Superman  was  to 
be,  Nietzsche  did  not  precisely  know,  though  we  may  well 
suspect  that  the  direction  in  which  he  strained  his  vision 
for  him  was  not  the  horizon  but  the  looking  glass.  Nietzsche 
has  not  even  the  credit  of  inventing  the  Superman,  for 
when  Nietzsche  was  six  years  old,  Tennyson  published  "In 
Memoriam,"  with  its  prophetic  peroration  : 

"A  closer  link 
Between  us  and  the  crowning  race.  .  .  . 

"No  longer  half  akin  to  brute, 
For  all  we  thought  and  loved  and  did, 
And  hoped,  and  suffered,  is  but  seed 
Of  what  in  them  is  flower  and  fruit." 

Tennyson  pressed  home  this  idea  of  the  further  evolution 
of  our  race  in  his  very  last  volume,  in  a  poem  called  "The 
Making  of  Man." 


THE  SUPERMAN  OF  LETTERS  197 

"Man  as  yet  is  being  made  and  ere  the  crowning  Age  of  ages 
Shall  not  aeon  after  aeon  pass  and  touch  him  into  shape?" 

And  again  in  "  The  Dawn." 

"Ah,  what  will  our  children  be, 
The  men  of  a  hundred  thousand,  a  million  summers  away  ?  " 

More  self-conscious  a  disciple  of  Machiavelli  than  Na- 
poleon was  our  own  Thomas  Cromwell,  who  carried  "The 
Prince  "  as  his  political  enchiridion,  and  who  within  three 
years  of  its  publication  chopped  off  Sir  Thomas  More's 
head  as  coolly  as  a  knight  captures  a  bishop  on  a  chess- 
board. If  you  have  to  choose  between  love  and  fear,  said 
the  Master,  then  fear  is  the  stronger  weapon.  With  fear, 
Thomas  the  pupil  hewed  his  way  to  the  great  ends  he  had 
set  himself.  Thomas  Cromwell's  application  of  the  sys- 
tem was,  however,  vitiated  by  one  radical  mistake.  By  a 
paradox,  worthy  of  Machiavelli  himself — and  repeated  in 
our  own  day  by  Bismarck —  "  thePrince  "  he  worked  for  was 
not  himself  but  his  sovereign.  Howsoever  Thomas  Crom- 
well may  have  appeared  the  true  gerent,  the  final  profit 
was  to  the  suzerain,  and  the  axe  of  despotism  which  he 
had  forged  for  Henry  VIII.  was  turned  against  his  own 
neck.  Of  his  canon  that  traitors  should  be  condemned 
unheard,  he  was  the  sole  victim.  Possibly  he  might  have 
triumphed  even  over  the  flaw  in  his  pi'actice,  had  Ann  of 
Cleves  been  more  personable.  It  was  essential  to  his 
game  to  queen  this  pawn,  and  queen  her  he  did.  But  at 
what  a  cost  I  It  has  been  said  that  if  Cleopatra's  nose 
had  been  longer,  the  world's  history  would  have  been  other. 
Of  the  German  princess's  nose  it  may  be  said  that  had  it 
been  prettier  —  or  perchance  had  Holbein  flattered  it  less 
before  it  was  seen  by  the  matrimonial  agent  —  Thomas 
Cromwell  would  have  continued  to  rule  England,  and 
Europe  might  have  been  spared  the  Thirty  Years'  War. 
But  even  Supermen  cannot  change  the  shape  of  ladies' 
noses,  and  in  this  surd  of  a  world,  where  the  best  laid 


198  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

plans  may  "gang  agley"  over  the  tilt  of  a  nostril,  what 
avail  your  Supermen  more  than  Supermice  ?  The  toasted 
cheese  is  but  temporary,  the  end  of  Napoleon  is  the 
mouse-trap. 

The  phenomena  of  history  are  indeed  too  multifarious 
for  consciousness,  and  the  Machiavellian  method  of  treat- 
ing persons  as  things  —  in  defiance  of  the  moral  maxim  — 
shatters  itself  upon  the  impossibility  of  foreseeing  all  the 
permutations  of  the  things.  A  bad  prince  is  no  more 
secure  against  assassination  than  a  good  prince.  A  religious 
reformer  may  arise  and  upset  the  snuggest  peace.  A 
failure  of  crops  may  precipitate  rebellion.  A  child's  arm 
may  plug  up  a  dam.  In  brief,  lacking  the  necessary 
omniscience,  the  shrewdest  of  Supermen  is  driving  in  the 
dark.  The  upshot  of  Napoleon's  career  was  to  make  Ger- 
many and  mutilate  France. 

It  is  through  lack  of  omniscience,  too,  that  we  cannot 
obey  the  frequent  modern  suggestion  to  breed  the  Super- 
man—  the  Superman,  that  is,  not  as  the  cold-blooded 
manipulator  of  man,  but  as  his  moral  superior  and  suc- 
cessor, Tennyson's  Superman,  not  Nietzsche's.  We  are 
too  abysmally  ignorant  for  evolutionary  eugenics.  We 
breed  horses  and  roses  for  higher  types,  but  then  we 
immeasurably  transcend  horses  and  roses.  Who  tran- 
scends us  so  immeasurably  that  he  should  breed  us  ?  In 
breeding  we  have  a  clear  vision  of  our  aim  —  to  produce  a 
thornless  rose  or  a  Derby  winner.  What  clear  vision  has 
any  one  of  the  Superman  ?  It  is  impossible  to  read  even 
Nietzsche  without  seeing  a  spectral  swarm  of  shifting 
types.  Moreover  we  breed  only  for  physical  qualities. 
What  experience  have  we  of  breeding  for  moral  qualities? 
And  what  were  all  our  breedings  compared  with  Nature's 
inexhaustible  experimentation,  her  thousand  million  men 
and  women  of  all  shades  and  psychoses,  her  endless  blend- 
ings  and  crossings  that  yield  now  Nietzsches,  now  Isaiahs  ; 
yesterday  Platos,  to-day  Darwins  and  Wagners. 


THE  SUPERMAN  OF  LETTERS  199 

The  Superman  will  come  of  himself :  already  man  rises 
as  imperceptibly  into  him  as  he  fades  into  the  orang-out- 
ang. "  This  was  no  man,"  said  Napoleon,  reading  the 
Sermon  on  the  Mount  —  an  involuntary  admission  by  the 
Machiavellian  of  a  finer  species  of  Superman  than  his  own. 

And  this  brings  us  to  the  paradox  that  the  defect  in 
Machiavelli's  system  was  not  in  his  morals  but  in  his  in- 
tellect. In  the  hive  he  examined  were  creatures  greater 
than  he,  obeying  motives  beyond  his  ken.  To  him  Princes 
ruled  primarily  for  their  own  glory,  for  the  pomp  and 
pride  of  power.  Of  the  small  but  infinitely  important 
class  of  rulers  who  assume  mastership  only  because  they 
have  the  greatest  power  to  serve,  he  has  no  adequate  con- 
ception. That  there  has  sometimes  been  a  Pope  who  felt 
himself  literally  servus  servorum  .Dei  passed  his  comprehen- 
sion. This  falsifies  his  treatment  of  history,  this  makes 
his  vision  imperfect,  this  throws  his  conclusions  out  of  gear. 
The  verse  in  St.  Matthew,  "  he  that  is  greatest  among  you 
shall  be  servant  of  all  the  rest "  represents  a  more  scien- 
tific generalisation.  As  Chapman's  Don  Byron  (Act  3, 
Scene  1)  reminds  us,  in  his  denunciation  of  "  the  schools 
first  founded  in  ingenious  Italy,"  the  true 

"  Kings  are  not  made  by  art 
But  right  of  nature,  nor  by  treachery  propt 
But  simple  virtue." 

But  Machiavelli,  that  crude  biologist,  treats  Moses  and 
Cyrus  as  creatures  of  the  same  species,  would  run  together 
the  Attilas  and  the  Buddhas.  Hence  the  hard  metallic 
sheen  of  his  style  as  of  an  old  Latin  prose-writer  ;  of  spir- 
itual iridescence,  of  Jewish  tenderness,  of  Christian  yearn- 
ing, of  even  the  Nietzschean  ecstasy  there  is  no  trace.  It 
is  not  astonishing  that  he  should  have  turned  a  scornful 
ear  to  Savonarola's  message,  dismissed  him  as  a  compound 
of  fraud  and  cunning.  How  dramatic  is  the  picture  of 
Mephisto  listening  to  the  preacher  of  San  Marco  that  week 
of  the  Carnival  of  1497  !     (What  a  pity  "  Romola  "  does 


200  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

not  exploit  that  episode  instead  of  using  Machiavelli  as  a 
mere  caustic  conversationalist.)  But  though  Machiavelli's 
flair  for  crouching  Caesars  was  not  utterly  at  fault,  though 
the  Dominican  did  indeed  aspire  to  be  "The  Prince"  of 
the  Church,  and  even  the  power  behind  the  thrones  of  the 
Princes  of  Christendom,  yet  'twas  all  ad  majorem  Dei 
gloriam  and  for  the  greater  confusion  of  the  infidel,  and 
George  Eliot  has  understood  this  impersonal  egotist  infi- 
nitely better  than  his  cynical  contemporary  understood  him. 
And  this  intellectual  limitation  —  this  absence  of  the  highest 
notes  from  his  psychological  gamut  —  must  always  keep 
Machiavelli  out  of  the  first  rank  of  writers.  He  cannot 
rise  above  the  notion  that  power  is  an  end  in  itself  and 
that  those  who  can  satisfy  it  "deserve  praise  rather  than 
censure."  If  the  King  of  France  —  he  tells  us  —  was 
powerful  enough  to  invade  the  kingdom  of  Naples,  then 
he  ought  to  have  done  it.  Though  Machiavelli  could  see 
that  the  individual's  crimes  "may  lead  to  sovereignty  but 
not  to  glory,"  yet  he  did  not  question  the  right  of  a  State 
to  absorb  or  shatter  another.    He  saw  that  the  world  went 

on 

*'  The  simple  plan 
That  they  should  take  who  have  the  power, 
And  they  should  keep  who  can," 

and  he  admitted  that  the  rule  was  indispensable  —  if  you 
went  into  politics.  This  was  his  crime  —  High  Treason 
against  Idealism.  Humanity- prefers  to  be  guided  by  rules 
which  it  disavows.  The  splendid  blonde  beasts  who  prac- 
tised the  maxims  of  Machiavelli  shuddered  at  the  scribe 
who  merely  stated  them.  Nowhere  probably  was  disgust 
with  the  Florentine  writer  more  vehement  than  in  Venice, 
which  employed  assassins  as  a  principle  of  polity.  Could 
that  Turkish  "  Prince  "  who  decreed  that  each  new  monarch 
of  his  house  must  safeguard  the  dynasty  by  massacring  his 
swarm  of  brothers,  or  that  Persian  "Prince"  who  invented 
the   principle  of  blinding   them,   have   seen   the   printed 


THE  SUPERMAN  OF  LETTERS  201 

"  Prince  "  of  Machiavelli,  they  with  their  correct  Islamic 
or  Zoroastrian  principles  would  have  shared  in  the  uni- 
versal opprobrium. 

That  the  world  shudders  still  is  shown  by  the  apologetic 
attitude  of  his  commentators  and  even  of  his  panegyrists. 
Not  one  but  repudiates  his  system,  charitably  traces  it  to 
the  unhappy  circumstances  of  his  day,  to  the  welter  of 
force  and  fraud  amid  which  his  lot  was  cast.  Yet  are 
these  circumstances  essentially  changed  ?  The  small  urban 
republics  have  vanished,  but  in  their  stead  are  the  Great 
Powers.  Caesar  Borgia  and  Ezzelino  are  gone,  but  we 
have  the  Congo  Ruler  and  the  Trust  Magnate.  "  Every 
country  hath  its  Machiavel,"  says  Sir  Thomas  Browne, 
and  there  is  no  spot  on  earth  where  the  maxims  of  "  The 
Prince  "  are  not  in  daily  operation.  The  voice  may  be 
the  voice  of  Savonarola,  but  the  hands  are  the  hands  of 
Machiavelli. 

Nay,  it  is  often  the  voice  of  Machiavelli  even  when  it 
sounds  like  the  voice  of  Savonarola.  For,  as  Lord  Acton 
subtly  pointed  out,  Machiavellism  lurks  in  many  a  seem- 
ingly innocent  and  even  pious  proposition.  It  is  perhaps 
straining  his  point  to  find  it  in  Jeremy  Bentham's  "  greatest 
happiness  principle,"  but  who  shall  doubt  but  that  it  is  in- 
volved in  the  popular  idea  that  "  Time  tries  all,  "and  that 
everything  happens  for  the  best  in  the  long  run,  and  that 
history  is,  after  all,  the  Will  of  God  ?  What  are  all  these 
nebulous  notions  but  the  acceptance  of  success  —  of  the 
brute  fact  —  as  the  moral  standard  ?  Less  obvious  than 
the  proposition  that  "  God  is  on  the  side  of  the  biggest 
battalions  "  they  are  substantially  identical  with  it.  They 
simply  mean  that  God  was  on  the  side  of  the  biggest 
battalions.  They  imply  that  whichever  party  triumphed, 
God  was  with  that  party.  So  that  many  even  of  those  who 
reject  Machiavelli  with  loathing  are  found  to  be  uncon- 
sciously Machiavellian. 

Hallam    in    his    "  Introduction   to   the    Literature   of 


202  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

Europe  "  palliates  the  darker  features  of  the  Machiavellian 
teaching  by  the  nature  of  the  times,  yet  in  his  own  "  Eu- 
rope during  the  Middle  Ages,"  writing  of  the  rapid  decay 
of  Charlemagne's  Empire  under  his  son  Louis,  "  called  by 
the  Italians  the  Pious,  and  by  the  French  the  Debonair  or 
Good-natured,"  he  says  "  the  fault  lay  entirely  in  his  heart; 
and  this  fault  was  nothing  but  a  temper  too  soft  and  a 
conscience  too  strict.  It  is  not  wonderful  that  the  Empire 
should  have  been  speedily  dissolved."  And  Charlemagne, 
its  peerless  founder,  is  described  as  having  divorced  nine 
wives,  beheaded  four  thousand  Saxons  in  a  single  day,  and 
executed  all  who  ate  flesh  during  Lent ! 

It  is  when  I  hear  the  words  of  Church  or  Press,  Parlia- 
ments or  Royal  Proclamations,  that  I  fall  into  a  rage 
against  language,  and  even  as  Sancho  Panza  blessed  the 
man  who  invented  sleep,  I  curse  the  man  who  invented 
speech.  In  the  beautiful  dumb  days  the  strong  rent  the 
weak  in  sacred  simplicity.  Now  the  strong  make  pious 
speeches  to  show  that  the  eupepsia  of  the  universe  is  their 
appetite's  aim,  and  the  weak  must  listen  to  proofs  that 
they  are  being  eaten  for  their  own  good.  Happily  the 
serpent  no  longer  talks,  else  were  his  slow  slimy  degluti- 
tion of  the  living  rabbit  accompanied  by  a  sermon.  The 
State  has  not  only  killed  Christ  but  stolen  his  words.  At 
the  Hague  the  lion  and  the  lamb  lie  down  together,  and 
the  concordial  words  flow  on  like  music,  till  the  lamb  sug- 
gests that  the  lion  should  pare  his  claws.  And  the  lamb 
himself — is  he  anything  but  a  wolf  in  sheep's  clothing? 
Is  he  not  at  heart  envious  of  claws,  always  feeling  his 
paws  for  talons  of  his  own  ? 

"  And  when  the  Lord  thy  God  shall  deliver  them  be- 
fore thee,  thou  shalt  smite  them  and  utterly  destroy  them : 
thou  shalt  make  no  covenant  with  them,  nor  show  mercy 
unto  them."  Where  outside  Machiavelli  shall  you  find  a 
clean  strong  sentence  like  this  of  Moses  ?  The  Destroying 
Angel's  sword  shall  be  sharp  and  antiseptic  as  a  surgeon's 


THE  SUPERMAN   OF  LETTERS  203 

knife ;  he  shall  leave  no  writhing  torsoes,  no  half -sawn 
limbs  and  festering  wounds  littering  the  purlieus  of  life. 
But  this  utterance  is  too  strong  for  Christian  stomachs,  it 
belongs  to  the  feefofum  eye-for-eye  period  of  the  Old 
Testament :  with  the  New  entered  the  reign  of  ethereal 
mildness,  lilies  showering  from  full  hands,  festal  fountains 
spouting  the  milk  of  human  kindness.  Well  might 
Wordsworth  cry  out: 

"  Earth  is  sick, 
And  Heaven  is  weary,  of  the  hollow  words 
Which  States  and  Kingdoms  utter  when  they  talk 
Of  truth  and  justice." 

But  even  the  Old  Testament  is  comparatively  sophisti- 
cated. This  extinction  of  the  native  tribes  of  Palestine 
is  enjoined,  not  on  political  grounds  but  on  religious.  It 
is  not  that  Palestine,  which  offers  the  most  convenient 
territory  for  the  refugees  from  Egypt,  happens  unfortu- 
nately to  be  densely  populated.  No,  virtue  must  be  vin- 
dicated, not  brute  force.  But  one  cannot  too  much  admire 
that  the  Biblical  historian  chose  the  less  nauseous  of  the 
two  morals  open  to  him.  "  Not  for  thy  righteousness,  or 
for  the  uprightness  of  thine  heart,  dost  thou  go  to  possess 
their  land ;  but  for  the  wickedness  of  these  nations  the 
Lord  thy  God  doth  drive  them  out  from  before  thee." 
By  a  remarkable  exception  in  epics,  Israel  is  the  villain, 
not  the  hero,  of  his  own  story.  But  all  the  same,  the 
story  has  to  be  coloured  in  the  interests  of  righteousness. 
His  successors  in  invasion  have  not  been  content  to  blacken 
the  autochthones,  they  have  brightened  themselves.  It 
is  for  their  own  uprightness  that  the  Lord  casts  out  the 
tribes  before  them  or  sets  them  to  rule  over  the  heathen. 
The  Lord  calls  them  to  spread  His  word  in  countries  closed 
to  their  commerce.  He  ordains  they  should  bear  the 
White  Man's  burden  —  the  Black  Man's  ivory  and  gold 
are  indeed  no  liglit  weight.  Pah!  let  us  talk  of  politics 
like  Machiavelli  or  for  ever  hold  our  pejice. 


204  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

And  yet  something  can  be  said  for  the  world's  hypocrisy. 
It  is  tlie  homage  which  the  Relative  pays  to  the  Absolute, 
part  of  that  yearning  of  mankind  for  indefectible  ideals, 
for  Luther's  "pearl  of  certainty."  Its  Kight  must  be 
Right  in  all  circumstances  under  the  stars,  nay,  before 
the  stars  were  born.  Etliics  shall  not  be  a  child  of  con- 
ditions ;  what  holds  between  man  and  man,  must  obtain 
equally  between  ruler  and  ruled,  even  between  State  and 
State.  But  what  is  to  be  done  when  ethics  demands  one 
thing  and  necessity  the  opposite?  Necessity  wins  of 
course,  but  on  condition  of  not  blazoning  its  victory. 
The  Church,  forbidden  to  shed  blood,  exacts  an  expiation 
from  its  indispensable  warriors,  or  gravely  invents  the 
bloodless  stake  for  its  heretics,  or  with  an  even  inore 
Immorous  preference  of  the  letter  to  the  spirit  forbids  its 
priests  to  practise  surgery.  The  negro,  enfranchised  by 
the  Quixotic  theory  of  the  American  constitution,  is  dis- 
established by  the  Sancho  Panzas  who  miscount  his  votes. 
The  Jew,  commanded  to  rid  himself  of  leaven  during 
Passover,  sells  his  stock  of  groceries  to  an  accommodating 
Christian  till  the  Festival  be  over.  The  Christian,  to 
whom  money-lending  is  a  sin  against  nature,  hands  over 
the  necessary  function  to  the  accursed  Jew  with  the 
sanction  of  St.  Thomas  Aquinas,  or  founds  the  Monte  di 
Pieta  which  Leo  X.  permits  to  exact  a  fee  on  its  loans  to 
cover  the  cost  of  its  officials.  Ethics,  like  the  old  astron- 
omy, complicates  itself  with  the  cycles  and  epicycles  of 
practice,  but  the  theory  of  the  perfect  circle  of  planetary 
motion  remains  immutable.  In  Lombardy,  in  Florence, 
under  the  very  eye  of  the  Pope,  the  industrial  system  of 
modern  Europe  founds  itself  on  money-lending,  but  no 
Encyclical  removes  the  prohibition  or  condones  the  sacri- 
lege, or  grants  Christian  burial  to  the  impenitent  financier. 
The  irresistil)le  force  of  facts  comes  into  collision  with 
the  immovable  body  of  principles,  but  the  crash  is  sound- 
less, and  by  a  delicate  instinct  Society  looks  the  other 


THE   SUPERMAN   OF  LETTERS  205 

way.  The  immortal  principle  is  buried  silently  —  not  a 
drum  is  heard,  not  a  funeral  note.  For  later  generations 
its  deadness  is  a  matter  of  course. 

Even  so  mankind  founds  its  social  systems  upon  beauti- 
ful ideals  and  averts  its  eyes  from  the  rotten  places  of  the 
fabric.  It  will  concede  almost  anything  to  practice,  if 
practice  will  only  remain  under  the  rose.  This  Social 
Conspiracy  is  sub-conscious.  In  war  or  in  religion,  in  sex 
or  even  the  smaller  animal  functions,  it  works  towards  a 
harmony  of  seeming,  an  artistic  selection  of  the  beautiful 
or  the  perfect  with  rejection  of  the  ugly  or  the  jarring. 
Is  not  this  indeed  our  highest  art,  this  art  of  civilisation, 
which,  out  of  the  raw  stuff  we  are,  fashions  us  into  the 
figures  of  an  heroic  and  poetic  masque  ?  Costumed  in  the 
skins  of  our  fellow  beasts  or  in  the  spoils  of  our  vegetable 
contemporaries,  our  dames  pranked  in  the  web  of  a  worm, 
we  ruffle  it  in  drawing-rooms  as  gods  and  spirits,  no  ter- 
restrial weakness  bewrayed.  Our  true  superiority  to  the 
brutes  is  that  we  are  artists,  and  they  are  naturals.  Man 
will  not  be  a  creature  of  Nature,  as  Coleridge  noted.  All 
the  world's  a  stage  and  all  the  men  and  women  players, 
or  —  to  say  it  in  Greek  —  hypocrites.  It  is  for  bad  man- 
ners that  Machiavelli  has  been  boycotted. 


LUCREZIA   BORGIA:     OR   THE   MYTH   OF 
HISTORY 


It  was  with  a  thrill  that  I  came  upon  a  holograph  of 
Lucrezia  Borgia  in  the  library  of  the  University  of  Ferrara. 
I  had  already  seen  in  a  little  glass  case  at  Milan,  in  the 
Ambrosian  library,  a  lock  of  her  notorious  yellow  hair, 
and  this  wishy-washy  tress,  so  below  the  flamboyance  of 
its  fame,  should  have  prepared  me  for  the  Ferrara  relic. 
For  the  document  was  —  of  all  things  in  the  world  —  a 
washing  list  !  The  lurid  lady  —  the  heroine  of  Donizetti's 
opera,  the  Medea  of  Victor  Hugo's  drama  —  checked,  per- 
haps mended,  her  household  linen  !  It  has  been  sufficiently 
washed  in  public  since  her  day.  But  this  list  alone  should 
serve  to  cleanse  her  character.  Indeed  Pope  Alexander's 
daughter  does  not  lack  modern  whitewashers  —  what 
ancient  disrepute  is  safe  from  them  ?  Roscoe,  Gilbert  and 
Gregorovius  defend  her,  and  even  in  her  lifetime  she  had 
her  circle  of  court  laureates  that  included  Ariosto  himself. 
Her  platonic  friendship  with  Cardinal  Bembo  is  rather  in 
her  favour.  The  copiously  grey-bearded  ecclesiast  in  cap 
and  robe,  whose  portrait  may  be  seen  at  Florence  in  the 
corridor  between  the  Pitti  and  the  Uffizi,  does  not  look 
like  a  man  who  would  consort  with  the  legendary  Lucrezia. 
Yet  even  a  man  of  letters  of  Bembo's  status  is  liable  to 
colour-blindness  when  the  Scarlet  Woman  is  a  reigning 
duchess.  Bembo,  we  know,  was  afraid  to  read  the  Epistles 
of  St.  Paul,  for  fear  of  contaminating  his  Latin,  but  we 
are  less  certain  that  any  fear  of  contaminating  his  char- 
acter would  keep  him  from  reading  the  epistles  of  Lucrezia. 

206 


LUCREZIA  BORGIA  207 

But  it  seems  fairest  to  accept  the  view  that  once  freed  bj' 
her  third  marriage  from  the  vicious  influences  of  the  Vati- 
can and  the  company  of  the  Pope's  concubines,  she  became 
rangee^  steadying  herself  into  an  admirable  if  pleasure- 
loving  consort  of  the  ruler  of  Ferrara  !  Nevertheless  even 
in  Ferrara  rumour  connected  her  with  the  murder  of  the 
poet  Ercole  Strozzi,  and  the  guides  used  to  count  among 
their  perquisites  the  blood-flecked  wall  of  the  Palace  in 
which,  by  way  of  revenge  for  her  extrusion  from  a  respect- 
able Venetian  ball-room,  she  poisoned  off  at  a  supper-party 
eighteen  noble  Venetian  youths,  including  a  natural  son  of 
her  own  whom  she  poignarded  in  the  frenzy  of  the  dis- 
covery. 

And  Addington  Symonds,  even  after  the  huge  mono- 
graph of  Gregorovius  in  her  favour,  can  only  exchange  the 
idea  of  "  a  potent  and  malignant  witch "  for  "  a  feeble 
woman  soiled  with  sensual  foulness  from  the  cradle,"  a 
woman  who  could  look  on  complaisantly  at  orgies  devised 
for  her  amusement,  applauding  even  when  Cesare  chivied 
prisoners  to  death  with  arrows. 

But  it  was  reserved  for  the  latest  biographer  of  the 
Borgias  (Frederick  Baron  Corvo)  to  write  of  her  :  "  She 
was  now  the  wife  of  royalty,  with  a  near  prospect  of  a 
throne,  worshipped  by  the  poor  for  her  boundless  and 
sympathetic  charity,  by  the  learned  for  her  intelligence,  by 
her  kin  for  her  loving  loyalty,  by  her  husband  for  her  per- 
fect wifehood  and  motherhood,  by  all  for  her  transcendent 
beauty  and  her  spotless  name.  Why  it  has  pleased  modern 
writers  and  painters  to  depict  this  pearl  among  women  as 
a  '  poison-bearing  maenad,'  a  '  veneficous  Bacchante  '  stained 
with  revolting  and  unnatural  turpitude,  is  one  of  those 
riddles  to  which  there  is  no  key."  As  for  there  being  no 
key  to  it,  that  is  nonsense,  for  naturally  Lucrezia  Borgia 
would  share  in  the  opprobrium  due  to  the  pravity  of 
Cesare  Borgia  and  Pope  Alexander  VI.,  and  Corvo  him- 
self claims  that  Gregorovius  proves  that  these  calumnious 


208  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

inventions  came  from  the  poisoned  pens  of  her  father's 
enemies.  Tlils  judgment  of  a  reckless  writer  may  how- 
ever be  discounted,  for  Corvo  throughout  defends  that 
Papal  Antichrist,  Lucrezia's  father,  in  a  spirit  which 
Machiavelli,  to  whom  "  virtu  "  and  "  magnanimita  "  meant 
efficiency  whether  for  good  or  evil,  could  not  possibly 
better.  And  he  gaily  announces  in  his  preface  that  he 
does  not  write  to  whitewash  the  House  of  Borgia,  "his 
present  opinion  being  that  all  men  are  too  vile  for  words 
to  tell."  In  such  a  darkness,  in  which  all  cats  are  grey, 
Lucrezia  Borgia  might  well  seem  as  white  as  a  blue-eyed 
Persian.  But  the  paradox  remains  that  Corvo  may  not 
impossibly  be  right.  As,  but  for  superhuman  strainings, 
Dreyfus  might  have  gone  down  to  history  as  a  traitor  to 
France,  so  may  the  Borgian  Lucrezia  have  been  as  blameless 
as  the  Tarquinian  to  whom  indeed  Ariosto  boldly  compares 
her.  The  woman  who  protected  the  Jews  during  a  famine, 
provided  poor  girls  with  dowries,  passed  evenings  over  her 
embroidery  frame  and  held  the  esteem  of  the  greatest  poet 
and  the  greatest  stylist  of  her  day,  may  really  have  lived 
up  to  that  washing  list.  Chose  jugee  is  never  absolutely 
true  in  history,  and  there  is  no  trial  but  is  liable  to  revision. 
Even  the  saints  are  not  safe  ;  the  devil's  advocate  may 
always  appeal.  Sir  Philip  Sidney  himself  has  been  sadly 
toned  down  in  his  latest  biography  and  per  contra  it  may 
well  be  that  Lucrezia  Borgia  has  innocently  shared  in  the 
blackness  of  the  Borgias.  But  how  shall  we  ever  know  ? 
How  is  it  possible  —  especially  considering  the  public  and 
private  conspiracy  of  falsification  and  suppression  —  to  un- 
cover the  truth  even  about  our  contemporaries  ?  Our  very 
housemates  elude  us.  The  simplest  village  happening  is 
recounted  by  the  onlookers  in  a  dozen  different  ways  ;  an 
historic  episode  varies  according  to  the  politics  of  the 
recording  newspaper.  Matthew,  Mark,  Luke  and  John 
recount  their  great  story,  each  after  his  own  fashion,  so 
that  even  "gospel  truth"  is  no  synonym  for  objective  ve- 


LUCREZIA  BORGIA  209 

racity.  Letters  are  taken  as  invaluable  evidence  in  past 
history,  yet  every  letter  involves  a  personal  relation  between 
the  writer  and  the  receiver,  is  written  in  what  the  logicians 
in  a  narrower  sense  call  "  the  universe  of  discourse,"  so 
that  words  written  to  one  man  differ  from  the  same  words 
written  to  another  man,  and  still  more  from  the  same  words 
written  to  a  woman.  Facetiousness,  exaggeration,  under- 
statement, pet-words,  words  in  special  meanings,  are  the 
note  of  intimate  intercourse.  'Tis  a  cipher  to  which  no- 
body else  has  the  key,  and  which  can  never  be  read  by  the 
chronicler.  "  Our  virtuous  and  popular  Gloster  "  might 
mean  "  our  vicious  and  universally  odious  Gloster."  How 
shall  the  peering  student  of  musty  records  behold  the 
wink  in  the  long-vanished  eye  of  the  writer,  the  smile  on 
the  skull  of  the  reader  ?  A  frigid  note  may  veil  a  burning 
love  ;  a  tropic  outburst  disguise  a  dying  passion.  Who 
has  the  clue  to  these  things  ?  And  in  the  literature  of  an 
age  the  things  that  are  understood  are  exactly  the  things 
that  are  not  written  down,  and  thus  the  things  that  are 
written  down  are  the  things  that  are  not  understood. 
What  would  we  not  give  for  a  little  realistic  description 
of  houses,  clothes  and  furniture  in  the  Bible  !  But  such 
information  only  drifts  into  the  text  indirectly  and  by 
accident.  Official  documents  are  the  bed-rock  of  history, 
yet  even  such  formal  things  as  birth-certificates  are  unre- 
liable, for  did  not  the  wife  of  my  dearest  friend  momen- 
tarily forget  where  her  own  baby  was  born  ?  Suppose 
Peggy  grows  up  a  celebrity,  an  Academician  or  even  a 
Prime  Minister,  what  is  to  prevent  her  birth-plaque  being 
affixed  to  the  wrong  house  ? 

Once,  and  once  only,  did  I  strive  to  penetrate  to  the 
sources  of  history  —  it  was  the  life  of  Spinoza  —  and  I 
found  to  my  amaze  that  the  traditional  detail  of  his  doings 
and  habits  rested  on  little  more  solid  than  the  mistranslated 
scribblings  of  a  Lutheran  pastor  who  had  occupied  his 
lodging  a  generation  after  his  death.     And  once  in  my 


210  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

life  did  I  examine  State  papers.  It  was  in  the  Archives 
of  Venice  ;  and  as  I  wandered  through  the  two  hundred 
and  ninety-eight  rooms  of  the  Recording  Angel  —  though 
I  did  not  verify  the  statement  that  there  are  fourteen 
million  documents  —  I  saw  enough  chronicles  and  certifi- 
cates, enough  Orators'  letters  in  cypher  from  every  court 
in  Europe  (with  inter-bound  Italian  translations)  to  keep 
in  life-long  occupation  a  staff  of  Methuselahs.  And  this 
for  only  one  town,  or,  if  you  will,  for  one  empire  !  Who 
is  it  that  has  the  patience  to  sift  this  mammoth  dust-heap, 
or  who,  having  the  patience,  is  likely  to  have  the  insight 
to  interpret,  or  the  genius  to  embody  its  essence  ?  How 
shall  we  know  which  ambassador  lied  abroad  for  his  coun- 
try's good,  and  which  for  his  own?  How  shall  we  abstract 
the  personal  equation  from  their  reports?  How  allow  for 
their  individual  prejudices,  jealousies,  stupidities,  rancours, 
mal-observations  and  dishonesties  ? 

As  the  wise  Faust  pointed  out.  History  is  a  subjective 
illusion. 

"Mein  Freund,  die  Zeiten  der  Vergangenheit 

Sind  uns  ein  Buch  mit  sieben  Siegeln. 

Was  ihr  den  Geist  der  Zeiten  heisst, 

Das  ist  im  Grund  der  Herren  eigner  Geist 

In  dem  die  Zeiten  sich  bespiegeln." 

Or  as  honest  Burckhardt  puts  it  more  prosaically  in  his 
preface  to  his  "  Renaissance  in  Italy  "  :  "  In  the  wide 
ocean  upon  which  we  venture,  the  possible  ways  and 
directions  are  many  ;  and  the  same  studies  which  have 
served  for  this  work  might  easily,  in  other  hands,  not  only 
receive  a  wholly  different  treatment  and  application,  but 
lead  also  to  essentially  different  conclusions." 

This  would  be  the  case  even  were  our  information  on 
the  past  complete.  The  reduction  of  this  wilderness  of 
material  to  ordered  statement  and  judgment  would  permit 
innumerable  ways  of  seeing  and  summarising.  But  con- 
sisting as  our  knowledge  does  for  the  most  part  of  mere 


LUCREZIA  BORGIA  211 

ruins  and  shadows,  or  worse,  of  substantial  falsities,  such 
infinite  perspectives  of  misreading  are  opened  up  that  the 
bulk  of  written  history  can  be  only  an  artistic  manipula- 
tion of  hypotheses.  What  wonder  if  the  original  research 
and  original  insight  of  successive  historians  is  constantly 
changing  the  colours  and  perspectives  ?  Read  Pope 
Gregory's  letter  to  the  German  princes  describing  the 
humiliation  of  Henry  IV.  and  judge  for  yourself  whether 
the  famous  story  of  the  three  days'  penance  can  really  be 
built  up  out  of  "  utpote  discaleiatus  et  laneis  indutus,^''  &c. 
or  whether  it  should  be  blotted  out  from  the  history-books 
as  some  modern  writers  demand.  Is  there,  indeed,  any 
episode  to  which  we  can  pin  a  final  faith  ?  Has  history 
bequeathed  us  anything  on  which  the  duty  to  truth  is  not 
so  large  as  almost  to  swallow  up  the  legacy  ?  Popular 
wisdom  in  insisting  that  "  Queen  Anne  is  dead  "  selects 
the  only  sort  of  historic  affirmation  which  can  be  made 
with  certainty.  As  for  any  real  picture  of  a  period,  how 
can  the  manifold  currents  of  the  ocean  of  life  be  represented 
in  a  single  stream  of  words  ? 

No  ;  the  truth  about  Lucrezia  Borgia  will  never  be  known. 
But  what  imports  ?  Our  librettists  and  dramatists  need 
themes,  our  novelists  cannot  do  without  "  veneficous 
Bacchantes."  If  Lucrezia  Borgia  was  not  a  "poison-bear- 
ing Msenad,"  somebody  else  was.  Perhaps  that  other  has 
even  annexed  the  reputation  for  virtue  that  should  have 
been  Lucrezia's  !  What  matters  who  is  which  ?  Let  them 
sort  themselves  out.  If  the  Meenad  or  the  Bella  Donna  is 
indispensable  to  the  novelist  or  the  dramatist,  so  is  the 
Vestal  Virgin  and  the  Saint,  and  though  his  models  may 
have  exchanged  names,  he  keeps  his  canvas  true  to  reality. 
Cleopatra,  to  judge  by  her  coins,  had  a  face  of  power,  not 
beauty,  but  shall  the  artist  therefore  surrender  the  con- 
ceptual Cleopatra  ?  Assuredly  there  has  been  no  lack  of 
beautiful  women  to  sterilise  statesmen  !  Great  figures  are 
even   more   necessary  in  life   than   in   art.     Life  would 


212  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

indeed  be  a  "  Vanity  Fair "  if  it  were  "  a  novel  without 
a  hero."  We  need  monuments,  memorials,  masses,  days 
of  commemoration  —  for  ourselves,  not  for  the  heroic 
dead.  Dead  men  hear  no  tales.  Posthumous  fame  is 
an  Irish  bull.  We  cannot  atone  to  the  dead  for  our 
neglect  of  them  in  their  lives,  but  we  need  the  mem- 
ory of  their  lives  to  uplift  ourselves  by,  we  need  the  out- 
pour of  reverence  for  nobility  of  soul,  we  need  to  lose 
ourselves  in  the  thought  of  greatness.  But  whether  we 
are  worshipping  the  right  heroes  is  comparatively  im- 
material. Let  us  not  be  depressed,  then,  at  the  dubiety 
of  history  or  at  that  labyrinth  of  Venetian  archives.  We 
can  do  without  the  belief  that  history  is  a  just  tribunal, 
so  long  as  we  preserve  the  belief  in  justice,  and  keep  a 
sufficient  store  of  heroes  to  applaud  and  villains  to  hiss. 
"  La  vie  des  heros  a  enrichi  V histoire,''^  said  La  Bruyere,  "  et 
Vhistoire  a  embelli  les  actions  des  heros.''''  It  is  a  fair  give 
and  take. 

Peculiarly  immaterial,  so  long  as  we  preserve  an  enno- 
bling conception  of  majesty,  is  the  real  character  of  that 
most  embellished  class  of  heroes  —  the  Kings.  Were  we 
pinned  down  to  drab  reality,  popular  loyalty  would  not 
infrequently  be  paralysed.  For  that  on  the  hereditary 
principle  a  constant  and  unfailing  succession  of  genius  and 
virtue  should  be  supplied  to  a  nation,  contradicts  all 
biological  experience,  yet  nothing  less  than  this  is  de- 
manded by  the  necessities  of  State  and  the  yearning  of 
every  people  for  wise  and  righteous  leadership.  In  truth 
heredity  is  ruled  out  of  court.  Kings  are  not  born  but 
made.  By  a  marvellous  process  of  mythopoiesis  the 
monarch  is  manufactured  to  suit  the  national  need,  and 
from  the  most  unpromising  materials  prodigies  of  goodness 
and  genius  are  created,  or,  in  the  case  of  female  sovereigns, 
paragons  of  beauty.  It  is  wonderful  how  far  a  single 
feature  will  go  with  a  princess,  and  what  crumbs  of  sense 
and  courage  will  suffice  for  the  valour  and  wit  of  a  prince. 


LUCREZIA  BORGIA  213 

Bricks  can  be  made  —  and  of  the  liighest  glaze  —  without 
a  single  wisp  of  straw.  Of  course  a  neutral  character 
supplies  the  best  basis  for  apotheosis  :  traits  too  positive 
for  evil  or  for  ugliness  would  render  the  material  intract- 
able. But  there  are  few  things  too  tough  for  the  national 
imagination  to  transform.  Perhaps  the  manufacture  of 
monarchs  is  thus  facile  because  the  article  is  not  required 
to  last.  The  duration  of  the  myth  need  not  exceed  a 
couple  of  reigns,  nor  need  it  be  robust  enough  for  expor- 
tation. Humanity,  while  insisting  on  the  perfection  of  its 
own  monarchs,  is  prepared  to  admit  that  prior  generations 
and  foreign  peoples  have  not  been  so  fortunate  :  indeed 
my  school  history  of  England  made  out  that  the  country 
had  been  governed  up  till  the  Victorian  era  by  a  succes- 
sion of  monsters  or  weaklings.  'Tis  distance  lends  disen- 
chantment to  the  view.  Even,  however,  when  the  hero  is 
real,  he  never  bulks  as  large  as  the  fantasy  of  his 
idolaters.  Napoleon  himself  was  a  pigmy,  compared  with 
the  image  in  the  heart  of  Heine's  "  Zwei  Grenadiere.^^ 

II 

Parasina,  the  Marchioness  d'Este,  that  other  heroine 
whom  Ferrara  has  contributed  to  romance,  or  —  if  you 
will  —  to  history,  for  she  makes  her  first  English  appear- 
ance in  Gibbon's  "Antiquities  of  the  House  of  Bruns- 
wick," has  been  less  fortunate  in  finding  defenders ;  perhaps 
because  her  guilt  was  less.  Very  shadowy  appears  that 
ill-starred  Malatesta  bride,  of  whom  nothing  seems  re- 
corded save  that  she  and  her  paramour,  Hugo,  her  hus- 
band's natural  son,  were  beheaded  by  her  righteously 
indignant  spouse.  Yet  she  grew  suddenly  solid  when  I 
found  a  scribble  of  hers,  neighbouring  Lucrezia  Borgia's 
washing-list.  "  Mandate  per  lo  portafore  del  presente  died 
ducati  d'oro  per  una  certa  spesa  la  quale  hahiamo  fatto."  It 
sounds  suspiciously  vague,  I   fear.     "  For  a  certain  ex- 


214  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

pense."  What  could  Parisina  have  bought  with  those 
ten  ducats  ? 

But  for  aught  we  know  they  may  have  been  dispensed 
in  charity.  And  for  aught  history  can  tell  us,  she  may  have 
been  as  spotless  as  Desdemona.  Gibbon,  mark  you,  is  by 
no  means  convinced  of  her  guilt.  If  the  couple  were  in- 
nocent, he  observes  oracularly,  the  husband  was  unfortu- 
nate ;  if  they  were  guilty,  he  was  still  more  unfortunate. 
"  Unfortunate  "  is  a  mild  word  for  the  Margrave,  as  if  his 
begetting  of  Hugo  were  a  mere  casualty.  It  is  true  that 
at  this  period  in  Italy  there  was  little  discrimination 
against  bastards,  especially  those  of  Popes  and  Princes. 
Still  Nicholas  had  only  himself  to  blame  for  thrusting  his 
Hugo  into  the  contiguity  of  his  wife.  Byron,  indeed,  in 
his  mediocre  poem  of  "  Parisina,"  makes  Hugo  offer  vivid 
reproaches  to  his  father  (mellifluously  transformed  to  Azo, 
which  the  poet  omits  to  say  was  really  the  name  of  the 
first  Margrave  of  the  line).  But  though  these  reproaches 
are  comprehensive  enough  : 

"  Nor  are  my  mother's  wrongs  forgot, 
Her  slighted  love  and  ruined  name, 
Her  offspring's  heritage  of  shame," 

and  embrace  even  the  charge  that  Parisina  was  originally 
destined  for  Hugo  himself,  but  refused  to  him  by  the 
father  on  the  brazen  ground  that  his  birth  was  unworthy 
of  her,  nevertheless  Byron,  like  most  vicious  men,  preserves 
the  conventional  view  of  the  husband's  rights. 

In  his  poem  Parisina's  fate  is  left  artistically  uncertain. 

"  No  more  in  palace,  hall,  or  bower 
Was  Parisina  heard  or  seen." 

But  the  guides  know  better.  She  was  beheaded  in  her 
dungeon,  and  the  original  door  leading  to  that  dungeon  is 
still  standing  in  the  mighty  old  castle,  and  I  passed  through 
it.     The  cell  is  two  storeys  below  this  grim  portal,  and  is 


LUCREZIA  BORGIA  215 

reached  through  a  trap-door  and  passages,  and  then  a 
second  trap-door  and  more  passages,  and  then  a  door 
of  iron  on  wood,  and  then  a  door  wholly  iron,  with 
an  iron  flap  through  which  her  food  was  pushed.  Poor 
Parisina,  poor  fluttering  bird,  caught  in  that  cage  of  iron! 
The  very  light  filters  into  this  cell  only  through  a  series  of 
six  cobwebbed  gratings,  tapering  narrower  and  narrower, 
as  though  some  elf  of  a  prisoner  might  squeeze  his  way  out 
into  the  moat.  Through  such  peep-holes,  and  asfuscously, 
filters  the  light  of  history  to  us  adown  the  cobwebbed 
centuries. 


SICILY   AND    THE   ALBERGO    SAMUELE    BUT- 
LER :   OR   THE   FICTION   OF   CHRONOLOGY 


To  cycle  in  Sicily  is  to  experience  the  joys  or  the 
sorrows  of  the  pioneer,  to  pedal  backward  on  the  road  of 
Time,  and  revisit  the  pre-bicycle  period  ere  man  had 
evolved  into  a  rotiferous  animal.  Palermo  has  witnessed 
the  landing  of  many  tribes  and  races  :  Phoenician  and 
Greek,  Roman  and  Goth,  Saracen  and  Norman,  Spaniard 
and  Savoyard.  But  not  till  my  comrade  and  I  disem- 
barked with  our  wheels  had  any  cyclist  troubled  the 
Custom  House.  Others,  indeed,  had  preceded  us  by  land, 
but  we  hold  the  record  by  sea  —  the  first  marine  invaders. 
And  our  arrival,  by  way  of  Tunis,  fitly  fluttered  and 
puddered  the  guardians  of  the  port.  Three  or  four 
officials  and  a  chaos  of  bystanders,  quidnuncs,  and  porters, 
entered  into  excited  discussion.  The  recording  angel  — 
a  mild  and  muddled  clerk,  whose  palsied  pen  shook  in  his 
fingers  —  turned  over  not  only  a  new  leaf,  but  a  new  book, 
and  made  us  sign  in  three  wrong  places  in  the  immaculate 
tome  ;  we  had  to  answer  a  world  of  questions,  and  await 
innumerable  calculations  and  consultations.  Meantime, 
without,  the  rich,  romantic  harbour  fretted  our  curiosity, 
and  the  painted  Sicilian  carts  gave  an  air  of  fairyland. 
The  very  dust-carts  were  perambulating  art-galleries, 
pompous  with  grave  historic  themes,  or  pious  with  carven 
angels  or  figures  of  the  Virgin  ;  the  horn  of  the  horses 
was  exalted,  springing  in  scarlet  from  the  middle  of  their 

216 


THE  FICTION   OF   CHRONOLOGY  217 

backs,  their  blinkers  and  headpieces  were  broidered  in  red. 
The  workaday  world  was  transfigured  to  poetry,  and  the 
old  Church-poet's  maxim: 

"  Who  sweeps  a  room  as  by  God's  laws 
Makes  that  aud  the  action  fine  " 

seemed  translated  into  visual  glorification  of  the  dignity 
of  labour  and  the  joy  of  common  life. 

Everything  combined  to  make  us  kick  our  heels  with 
unusual  viciousness.  Finally  we  were  condemned  to  pay 
about  fourpence  each,  and,  mounting  our  ransomed 
machines,  we  rode  forth  into  the  strange  new  world. 

Palermo  itself  proved  a  disappointment  ;  a  monstrous, 
straggling,  stony,  modern  city,  wedged  between  mountain 
and  harbour,  as  difficult  to  escape  from  as  a  circle  of  the 
Inferno.  Miles  on  miles  of  hard  riding  still  leave  you 
liemraed  in  by  unlovely  houses,  harried  by  electric  trams. 
But  at  last,  by  muddy  byways,  you  come  upon  fluting 
shepherds,  grey  olive-trees,  flowering  almonds,  orange- 
groves,  gleaming  like  fairy  gold  through  bowers  of  green, 
and  beyond  and  consecrating  all,  the  blue-spreading,  sun- 
dimpled  sea.  You  have  reached  the  land  of  Theocritus 
—  though  Theocritus  himself,  by  the  way,  is  quite 
unknown  to  the  Palermese  booksellers.  And  if  Palermo 
is  prosaic,  Monreale,  not  five  miles  off,  is  one  of  the  remot- 
est towns  in  Europe.  Perched  eleven  hundred  and  fifty 
feet  above  the  sea,  over  which  it  looks  superbly  across  a 
pastoral  landscape,  it  is  a  dirty  network  of  steep  and 
ancient  alleys,  with  shrines  at  street-corners,  and  running 
fountains  down  steps,  and  large  yellowish  jars  on  the 
house-ledges  by  way  of  cisterns.  The  roadway  swarms 
with  morose,  shawled,  swarthy  men,  lounging  and  gossip- 
ing, while  the  busy  women  stride  along,  bearing  brimming 
vase-pitchers  on  their  gracefully  poised,  kerchiefed  heads  ; 
goats,  greedy  of  garbage,  feed  ubiquitously,  some  rampant 
on  tubs   of   squeezed  lemons  ;  poultry   peck  and  scurry 


218  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

through  the  slime  ;  the  milkman  passes  with  his  mobile 
milkcan,  the  she-goat,  to  be  tapped  at  every  door  ;  on  the 
mouldering  fagades  stream  flaring  insignia  of  orange-peel, 
strung  together  for  sale  to  confectioners,  or  macaroni 
hangs  a-drying  in  the  sun.  And,  for  crowning  assurance 
of  medisevalism,  the  magnificent  Roman-Saracen  cathedral, 
surely  one  of  the  seven  wonders  of  Christendom,  offers  its 
bronze  portals  and  its  Byzantine  blaze  of  mosaics,  Bible 
illustrations  naive  as  a  Noah's  ark.  Monreale  is  already 
the  true  Sicily,  with  its  aloofness  from  the  modern  age, 
and  with  its  architecture  carrying  like  geological  strata 
the  record  of  all  the  influences  to  which  it  has  been 
exposed.  Presently  the  cyclist  or  the  motorist  will  leave 
a  new  imprint  upon  the  historic  soil,  saturated  with  the 
blood  of  rival  races,  and  with  the  finest  poetry  of  Pagan 
mythology.  At  present  there  are  few  roads  for  him  to 
follow,  and  fewer  inns  to  lodge  him,  and  the  rumour  of 
brigands  dogs  his  footsteps,  though  we  ourselves  never 
encountered  even  an  exorbitant  landlord.  Like  Blondins 
of  the  bicycle,  we  pursued  our  unmolested  way  over  ten- 
uous ridges,  'twixt  ditch  and  rut,  daring  to  swerve  no 
hair's-breadth,  and  the  only  terror  of  the  countryside  was 
that  which  we  ourselves  produced.  Wherever  we  passed, 
pigs  scuttered  and  poultry  fluttered,  and  goats  bleated 
and  kids  scampered ;  horses  reared  and  broke  from  their 
traces,  mules  stampeded  in  craven  terror,  dogs  fled  howling 
or  dumbstruck,  whole  populations  crowded  to  the  doors 
and  balconies,  children  escorted  us  literally  by  hundreds, 
racing  by  short  cuts  across  the  mountain-paths  to  get 
additional  glimpses  of  us  from  parallel  parapets.  Like 
ominous  comets  we  flared  through  the  old  Sicilian  villages, 
scattering  awe  and  wonder.  The  only  sensible  creatures 
were  the  donkeys  ;  they  regarded  us  stolidly,  or  turned  a 
head  of  mere  intelligent  curiosity  upon  our  receding 
mechanisms.  Our  wheels  had  become  Time-machines, 
tests  of  the   difference   from  standard  central-European 


THE  FICTION  OF  CHRONOLOGY  219 

time,  and  they  showed  Sicily  half  a  century  —  nay,  a 
whole  cycle  —  slow. 

Chronology  is  indeed  a  metaphysical  figment,  and  even 
this  little  globe  still  offers  all  the  centuries  simultaneously 
to  the  traveller. 

Fantastic  is  the  common  reckoning  of  time  by  which  our 
globe  revolves  in  a  temporal  continuum,  so  that  it  is  the 
same  date  — within  twelve  hours  —  all  over  its  surface.  The 
Irishman  who  spoke  of  the  so-called  nineteenth  century 
was  severely  logical.  The  nineteenth  century  has  not 
even  yet  dawned  for  the  bulk  of  our  planet,  which  presents 
in  fact  a  bewildering  diversity  of  dates.  The  Pyrenees 
divide  not  merely  right  from  wrong,  as  Pascal  was  puzzled 
to  find,  but  even  century  from  century. 

Meals  in  the  byways  of  Sicily  were  rather  haphazard. 
The  hotels  had  often  nothing  in  the  house,  and  even  when 
one  advanced  the  money  to  get  something,  there  might  be 
a  dearth  in  the  neighbourhood.  Macaroni  is,  however,  a 
standby.  But  a  single  bed-sitting-dining-and-coffee-room 
spells  adventure  rather  than  accommodation.  The  posses- 
sion of  one  spare  room  sets  up  the  hardy  Sicilian  peasant- 
woman  as  a  hotel-keeper.  Ceres  wandering  through  Sicily 
in  search  of  Proserpina  must  have  had  a  poorish  time, 
unless  she  fell  back  upon  her  own  horn  of  plenty.  It  was 
a  voluptuous  emotion  to  glide  one  evening  into  the  broad 
white  streets  of  Castelvetrano  under  a  crescent  moon  and 
into  the  haven  of  a  real  hotel. 

Castelvetrano  was  the  nearest  town  to  one  of  the  great 
goals  of  our  pilgrimage  —  the  ruins  of  Selinunte.  The  Nor- 
mans did  not  conquer  Sicily  as  permanently  as  those  old 
Greeks,  and  even  in  their  decay  the  Greek  temples  of 
Sicily  rank  with  the  most  precious  vestiges  of  ancient  art. 
Some  hours  of  cycling  brought  us  to  the  magnificent  chaos 
of  graven  stone  that  fronts  eternity  on  a  barren  field  by  a 
lonely  shore.  There  they  lie,  seven  temples,  sublime  in 
their  very  huddle  and  pell-mell,  a  wilderness  of  snapt  and 


220  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

tumbled  columns,  Ossa  piled  on  Pelion.  Only  one  of 
Vulcan's  freaks  —  and  the  fire  god  had  a  workshop  under 
Etna  —  could  have  wrought  this  mighty   upheaval.     In 

'  utter  abandonment  the  land  stretches  towards  the  empty 
sea,  and  where  priests  sacrificed  and  worshippers  trod, 
spring  the  wild  parsley,  the  purple  anemone,  the  marigold 
and  the  daisy.  From  clefts  of  the  great  broken  bases  or 
in  hollows  of  the  fallen  capitals  push  dwarf  palms  and 
myrtles,  like  the  lower  world  of  the  vegetable  reasserting 
itself  over  the  stone  that  had  mounted  to  beauty  by  alliance 
with  man's  soul.  An  odd  monolith  left  towering  here  or 
there  but  accentuates  the  desolation. 

The  temples  of  Concord  and  of  Juno  Lacinia  still  stand 
four-square  to  the  winds  at  Girgenti.  But  of  all  the 
temples  that  preserve  for  us  "  the  glory  that  was  Greece," 
that  of  Segesta  stands  predominant,  if  only  by  reason  of 
its  situation.  From  afar  it  draws  the  eye  upwards, 
gleaming  almost  white  on  its  hilltop.  But,  standing  amid 
the  wild  fennel  in  its  grassy  court,  you  see  that  the  noble 
Doric  pillars,  though  marvellously  preserved  through 
three-and-twenty  centuries,  are  corroded  in  great  holes 
and  bear  the  rusty  livery  of  Time.  Behind  the  temple 
the  earth  sinks  into  a  gigantic  cup,  forming  a  natural 
theatre,  and  in  front  stretches  a  vast  spread  of  rolling 
hills,  with  beautiful  cloud-shadows  of  purple  and  brown 
and  silver,  and  a  little  glimmer  of  the  Gulf  of  Castella- 
mare.  The  few  cultivated  patches,  the  faint  trees  and 
solitary  farms  in  the  dim  background,  scarcely  modify  the 
impression  of  Nature  unadorned.  Nothing  is  given  you 
but  the  largest  elemental  things  —  the  sun,  the  sea,  the 
barren  mountains,  and  the  sternest,  sublimest  form  of 
human  architecture.  Nothing  is  known  even  as  to  the 
god  to  whom  the  temple  was  dedicated. 

One  could  wish  that  mighty  Syracuse,  with  its  memo- 

k  ries  of  ^Eschylus  and  Pindar,  had  lapsed  to  such  a  wilder- 
ness instead  of   survivino:  as  a  small  modern  town  for 


THE  FICTION  OF  CHRONOLOGY  221 

tourists.  A  Babylon  with  restaurants  and  cab-fares  is 
bathos.  But  Taormina  —  the  first  Greek  settlement  — 
still  remains,  despite  its  pleasure-pilgrims,  the  culminating 
point  of  a  visit  to  Sicily.  Culminating,  too,  in  a  sense 
that  will  not  recommend  it  to  C3'clists.  Ours  are  perhaps 
the  only  machines  that  have  laboured  steadily  and  daily 
up  this  forbidding  steep,  some  four  hundred  feet  above 
the  sea  and  the  railway  station.  The  road  mounts  even 
higher  —  past  walled  gardens  of  roses  and  lemons  and 
almonds,  till  from  the  ruined  castle  at  JNIola  you  command 
a  marvellous  scape  of  land  and  sea.  But  the  mere  every- 
day view  from  Taormina  itself  is  one  of  the  greatest  pic- 
tures of  the  Cosmic  Master,  for  out  beyond  the  sunlit 
straits  shows  the  Calabrian  foot  of  Ital}^  generally  muffled 
in  a  fairy  mist,  while  the  Sicilian  shore  is  washed  by  a 
pale  rainbowed  streak  of  sea.  And  for  eternal  background 
Etna  towers,  infinitely  various,  now  in  snow-white  majesty, 
now  cloud-veiled  and  sombre,  now  ablaze  with  an  apoca- 
lyptic splendour  of  sunset.  But  it  is  in  the  wooded  gorges 
around  Taormina,  with  their  tumbling  rock-broken  streams, 
that  the  climax  of  Sicilian  picturesqueness  is  reached  :  here 
is  all  the  wild  witchery  of  romantic  landscape,  set  to  music, 
as  it  were,  by  the  piping  and  trilling  of  some  solitary,  far- 
off  shepherd,  whose  every  note  travels  clear-cut  in  the 
lucid  air.  In  the  grove  below  you  passes  a  procession  of 
young  women,  their  right  hands  supporting  lemon-baskets 
on  their  shawled  heads.  Their  feet  are  bare,  and  they 
sing  a  wistful  Eastern  melody  as  they  move  slowly  on. 
A  boy  leads  a  black  cow  by  a  string  round  its  horns.  All 
is  antique  and  pastoral.  Or  rather,  the  Eclogues  of  Virgil 
and  the  Idylls  of  Theocritus  seem  contemporay. 

At  the  Greek  Theatre,  too,  that  naked  majestic  amphi- 
theatre, how  tinkling  and  trivial  would  have  sounded  the 
dialogue  of  modern  drama.  Sophocles  and  ^schylus  alone 
could  fill  the  spaces  with  due  thunder.  Or  was  not  the 
large  drama  of  the  Greeks  positively  forced  upon  them  by 


222  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

this  great  natural  theatre,  o'er-towered  by  mountains, 
roofed  by  the  sky,  and  giving  on  the  sapphire  sea?  The 
infinities  and  the  eternities  conspired  with  the  dramatist 
in  a  religious  uplifting,  and  his  utterance  must  needs  be 
spacious  and  noble. 

II 

I  was  not  aware  that  any  English  writer  had  achieved 
the  distinction  of  stamping  his  name  upon  a  Sicilian  street, 
or  even  —  quainter,  if  lesser  glory  —  upon  a  Sicilian  inn. 
Yet  at  Calatafimi,  a  little  town  so  obscure  (despite  its 
heroic  Garibaldi  memories)  that  it  had  not  yet  reached 
the  picture-postcard  stage,  a  town  five  miles  from  a  rail- 
way station,  up  one  of  the  steepest  and  stoniest  roads  of 
the  island,  I  lodged  at  the  Albergo  Samuele  Butler,  and 
walked  through  the  Via  Samuele  Butler.  Yes,  this  pe- 
culiar immortality  was  reserved  in  a  Catholic  land  for  our 
British  iconoclast.  It  was  the  Communal  Council  that 
resolved  that  the  street  leading  from  the  Nuovo  Mercato 
towards  Segesta  should  "  honour  a  great  man's  memory, 
handing  down  his  name  to  posterity,  and  doing  homage  to 
the  friendly  English  nation."  But  the  change  in  the  name 
of  the  inn,  which  is  in  another  street,  must  have  been  due 
to  the  personal  initiative  of  the  proprietors,  in  commemo- 
ration of  their  distinguished  client.  Meantime  "  the 
friendly  English  nation "  cares  even  less  about  Samuel 
Butler  of  "  Erewhon  "  than  about  Samuel  Butler  of  "  Hu- 
dibras,"  if  indeed  it  distinguishes  one  from  the  other. 

Thus  the  super-subtle  satirist,  understanded  not  of  the 
British  people,  paradoxical  in  death  as  in  life,  has  left  his 
highest  reputation  in  the  hearts  of  Sicilian  peasants.  The 
recluse  of  Clifford  's  Inn,  the  stoic  and  cynic  of  civilisation, 
was  hail  fellow  well  met  with  the  cottagers  of  Calatafimi. 

It  was  only  natural  that  the  pundits  of  Trapani  should 
welcome  with  complacent  acquiescence  the  theory  of  "  The 
Authoress  of  the  Odyssey,"  which  was  received  in  England 


THE  FICTION  OF  CHRONOLOGY  223 

with  such  raised  eyebrows ;  for  did  not  Butler  locate  the 
adventures  of  Ulysses  as  a  voyage  round  Sicily,  and  iden- 
tify Trapani  as  the  place  where  the  lady  writer  composed 
the  Odyssey  ?  Butler  won  equal  gratitude  in  Italy  by  his 
exhumation  and  glorification  of  the  sculptor  Tabachetti, 
whom  he  identified  with  the  Flemish  Jean  de  Wespin. 
But  these  learned  lucubrations  of  his  would  not  have  suf- 
ficed to  enthrone  Butler  in  the  hearts  of  the  simple.  That 
was  the  reward  of  his  Bohemian  bonhomie.  "  He  always 
remembered  all  about  everybody,"  says  his  friend,  Mr. 
Festing  Jones,  "and  asked  how  the  potatoes  were  doing 
this  year,  and  whether  the  grandchildren  were  growing  up 
into  fine  boys  and  girls,  and  never  forgot  to  inquire  after 
the  son  who  had  gone  to  be  a  waiter  in  New  York." 

"  He  called  me  la  hella  Maria,''^  the  septuagenarian 
landlady  of  the  Albergo  Samuele  Butler  told  me,  as  she 
showed  me  the  photograph  he  had  given  her  —  the  portrait 
of  the  melancholy  tired  thinker,  whom  she  survives  with 
undiminished  vitality  and  fire.  He  was  done  in  a  group, 
too,  with  her  and  her  husband,  and  altogether  appeared  to 
have  found  a  rest  from  the  torture  of  thought  and  the  bitter- 
ness of  "  The  Way  of  All  Flesh  "  in  these  primitive  per- 
sonalities. 

And  here  again  I  had  occasion  to  note  the  absurdity  of 
chronology,  the  first  century  and  the  fortieth  lodging  under 
the  same  roof  —  for  Butler  was  at  least  as  far  ahead  of  the 
twentieth  century  as  his  hostess  was  behind  it.  Pleasant 
it  is  to  think  that  there  is  a  possible  human  community  be- 
tween epochs  so  sundered. 

Spring  after  spring  came  Butler  to  the  inn  that  now 
bears  his  name,  and  having  followed  unconsciously  in  his 
footsteps,  and  slept  in  his  very  bed,  I  wonder  how  he  could 
have  found  life  tolerable  there.  The  Admirable  Crichton  of 
his  day,  novelist  and  poet,  musician  and  painter,  scientist 
and  theologian,  art  critic  and  sheep  farmer,  and  perhaps 
the  subtlest  wit  since  Swift,  Samuel  Butler  seems  to  have 


224  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

reduced  his  personal  demands  upon  the  universe  to  a  smaller 
minimum  than  Stevenson  in  his  most  admired  moments. 
And  that  not  from  poverty,  for  his  resources  in  later  life 
were  adequate,  but  from  sheer  love  of  "  plain  living 
and  high  thinking."  The  walls  of  his  bedroom  in  the 
formerly  yclept  Albergo  Centrale  are  whitewashed,  the 
ceiling  is  of  logs,  the  washstand  of  iron,  and  even  if  the 
water-jug  is  a  lovely  Greek  vase  with  two  handles,  and 
the  pail  a  beautiful  green  basin,  this  is  only  because  Sicily 
supplies  no  poorer  form  of  these  articles.  The  bed  is  of 
planks  on  iron  trestles.  The  Albergo  itself,  with  its  prim- 
itive sanitation,  is  in  keeping  with  its  best  room.  For 
Sicily  it  is,  perhaps,  a  Grand  Hotel,  embracing  as  it  does 
an  entire  flat  of  three  bedrooms  on  the  second  floor  (a  cob- 
bler occupies  the  ground  floor,  and  the  m3^stery  of  the  first 
floor  I  never  penetrated).  This  three-roomed  hotel  is  shut 
off  from  the  rest  of  the  house  by  a  massive  portal.  On 
the  first  night  there  appeared  to  be  even  a  dining-room, 
but  morning  revealed  this  as  a  mere  ante-chamber, 
windowless,  and  depending  for  its  liglit  upon  the  bedroom 
doors  being  open.  On  the  second  night  even  this  substi- 
tute for  a  dining-room  vanished,  owing  to  the  advent  of  an- 
other traveller,  and  the  ante-room  became  a  bedroom  so 
that  I  had  to  make  my  entrances  and  exits  through  the 
new  lodger's  pseudo-chamber.  The  landlady  also  passed 
through  it  on  her  morning  visit  to  me,  which  was  made 
without  any  regard  for  my  morning  tub.  '■'-  E  permessof'' 
she  asked  gaily,  as  she  sailed  in.  This  was  her  ordinary 
formula  —  first  to  come  in,  and  then  to  ask  if  she  might. 

When  I  opened  my  door  I  had  a  curious  double  picture 
impressed  upon  my  memory  :  the  shirted  backs  of  two  young 
men  dressing,  each  in  his  room  ;  the  one  in  the  bedroom 
proper  was  seen  in  a  pale  morning  light,  the  occupant  of 
the  windowless  ante-room  was  vividly  Rembrandtesque 
under  his  necessary  lamp.  Each  was  singing  cheerily  to 
himself  as  he  made  his  toilette. 


THE  FICTION  OF  CHRONOLOGY  225 

Nor  was  the  food  superior  to  the  accommodation.  But- 
ter was  unobtainable  during  my  stay,  and  breakfast  con- 
sisted of  dry  bread,  washed  down  by  great  bowls  of  coffee. 
Fish  was  not,  and  the  meat  had  better  not  have  been.  I 
must  admit  that  the  dry  bread  was  served  with  an  air  that 
made  it  seem  wedding  cake.  "  Pane  ! "  la  Bella  Maria 
would  exclaim  ecstatically,  dumping  the  coarse,  scarce  edi- 
ble loaf  on  the  table  with  a  suggestion  of  Diana  triumphant 
in  the  chase.  "Co^e.-'"  was  another  hallelujah,  as  of  a 
Swiss  Family  Robinson,  discovering  delectable  potions. 
And  '■'■Latte !  "  bore  all  the  jubilation  of  a  cow  specially 
captured  and  despoiled  for  the  first  time  in  human  history 
of  the  treasure  of  its  dugs.  Maria's  manner  of  waiting 
revitalised  the  common  objects  of  the  breakfast  table, 
made  them  a  fairy-tale  again ;  under  her  magic  gestures 
every  piece  of  sugar  grew  enchanted  and  every  spoon  an 
adventure.  And  Butler's  tastes  were  of  the  simplest,  even 
in  Clifford's  Inn,  where,  out  of  consideration  for  his  old 
laundress,  he  made  his  own  breakfast  before  she  turned  up. 
All  the  same,  the  attraction  of  Calatafimi  for  Butler  is 
difficult  to  explain.  It  is  one  of  the  dingiest  Sicilian 
towns,  littered  with  poultry,  goats,  children,  and  refuse, 
though,  of  course,  you  are  soon  out  of  it  and  amid  the 
scenery  of  Theocritus.  But  the  view  from  Butler's  own 
balcony  —  often  a  paramount  consideration  for  a  writer — 
was  not  remarkably  stimulating  ;  hemmed  in  by  the  oppo- 
site houses,  though  rising  into  hills  and  a  ruined  castle. 

Nor  was  he  a  student  of  the  campaign  of  the  Thousand, 
Homeric  as  was  the  battle  of  Calatafimi.  It  may  be  that 
he  found  the  spot  more  secluded  than  a  seaport  like  Tra- 
pani  for  pursuing  his  topographical  investigations  into  the 
wanderings  of  the  woman-made  Ulysses  ;  or  it  may  be  that 
he  found  unceasing  rapture  in  the  contemplation  of  the 
aforesaid  temple  of  Segesta  that  dominates  the  landscape 
from  its  headland,  albeit  a  closer  contemplation  of  its  noble 
columns  costs  a  five-mile  walk  and  climb.     Here  Goethe 


226  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

came  and  philosophised  on  the  passing  show  of   human 
glory,  and  here,  too,  Butler  may  have  loved  to  muse. 

In  a  fine  sonnet  on  Immortality,  published  in  the  Athe- 
nceum  a  few  months  before  mortality  claimed  him,  Butler 
expressed  his  belief  that  the  only  after-life  for  the  dead 
lay  in  the  hearts  of  the  living,  and  only  upon  their  lips 
could  those  meet  whom  the  centuries  had  parted. 

"  We  shall  not  even  know  that  we  have  met, 
Yet  meet  we  shall,  and  part,  and  meet  again 
Where  dead  men  meet,  on  lips  of  living  men." 

It  is  strange  to  me,  who  lived  —  as  chronology  would 
say  —  in  the  same  age  as  Butler,  and  in  the  same  London, 
and  only  a  minute's  walk  from  him,  to  think  that  I  should 
yet  never  have  met  him  save  on  the  lips  of  the  peasants  of 
Calatafimi,  lips  that  spoke  only  Sicilian. 


INTERMEZZO 


Here  have  I  been  in  Italy  half  a  book,  and  scarcely  a 
page  about  the  Pictures  or  the  "National  Monuments." 
"CV  vuol  pazienza.'"'  I  fear  you  will  soon  cry  "hold,  enough," 
as  I  have  cried  many  a  time  in  these  endless  galleries 
congested  with  bad  pictures,  yet  apparently  never  to  be 
weeded.  For  the  bad  Masters  were  just  as  prolific  as  the 
good,  besides  having  the  advantage  of  numbers.  Civer- 
chio,  Crespi,  Garofalo,  the  Caracci,  Penni,  Guercino, 
Domenichino — the  very  names  recall  acres  of  vast  glar- 
ing canvases,  and  the  memory  of  Pistoja  with  only  one 
picture  to  see  —  and  that  a  Lorenzo  di  Credi  —  is  as  the 
shadow  of  a  great  rock  in  a  weary  land.  Berenson,  that 
prince  of  connoisseurs  and  creative  critics,  has  done  brave 
service  both  in  dethroning  and  uplifting.  Yet  am  I  con- 
vinced there  is  still  a  wilderness  of  invaluable  pictures  by 
unvalued  artists,  who,  to-day  obscure,  shall  to-morrow  be 
exalted  in  glory.  Mutations  of  taste  are  not  yet  fore- 
closed :  Michelangelo  himself  with  his  Super-statues,  may 
recede  and  rejoin  the  mellifluous  Raphael,  while  Siena 
replaces  Florence.  The  art  of  Japan  may  win  further 
victories,  or  we  may  follow  the  great  expounder  of 
Renaissance  painting  to  his  Chinese  Canossa.  Or  the 
revolt  against  anecdote  may  spread  to  sacred  anecdote, 
and  disestablish  the  bulk  of  Christian  art.  I  can  imagine 
a  newer  Pre-Raphaelitism  ruling  the  vogue,  and  Stefano  da 
Zevio's  St.  Catherine  in  the  Hose- Garden  becoming  the 
centre  of  the  world's  desire.  I  have  a  weakness  myself 
for  this  Veronese  picture,  just  because  it  is  so  frankly  free 

227 


228  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

from  so  many  artistic  virtues,  so  unpretentious  of  reality, 
so  candidly  a  pattern,  a  reverie  in  roses  and  birds  and 
angels  and  gold,  a  poem,  a  melting  music.  I  like  this 
new  chord  of  roses  and  haloes,  it  is  a  rare  harmony,  a 
lovely  marriage  of  heaven  and  earth.  I  can  well  imagine 
a  visual  art  arising  which  will  repudiate  realities  alto- 
gether. The  cinematograph  has  come  to  complete  the 
lesson  of  the  camera,  and  to  throw  back  the  artist  on  his 
own  soul. 

But  whatever  revolutions  in  taste  await  us,  my  peregri- 
nations have  convinced  me  that  there  is  no  single  con- 
sciousness in  the  world  that  holds  a  knowledge  of  the 
treasure  of  art,  even  though  we  limited  the  art  to  Italian, 
nay  though  we  omitted  sculpture  and  architecture  and 
tapestries,  and  the  delicious  terra-cottas  of  Luca  della 
Robbia,  and  ivories  and  bronzes  and  goldsmiths'  work, 
and  the  majolicas  of  Urbino  and  Pesaro,  and  cameos  and 
medallions  and  glass-work,  and  book-binding  and  furni- 
ture, and  the  intarsiatura  of  cassoni  and  pulpits  and  choir- 
stalls  and  lecterns,  and  the  pavement  art  of  the  graffiti,  and 
everything  save  drawing  and  painting.  For  when  every 
church,  house,  and  gallery  in  the  world  had  been  ransacked 
for  every  trace  of  Italian  brush  or  pencil  on  plaster,  can- 
vas or  paper,  and  all  this  registered  in  the  one  poor  human 
brain,  there  would  still  remain  the  unexplored  ocean  of 
illumination  —  the  manuscript  books  and  missals,  and  de- 
crees and  charters  of  guilds  and  confraternities  and  Monti 
di  Pieta,  and  lists  of  monks  and  rules  of  monasteries,  and 
matricular  books  of  Drapers  and  Mercers,  and  even  deco- 
rative wills  and  deeds  of  gift  —  all  that  realm  of  beauty  so 
largely  extinguished  by  printing. 

Upon  which  fathomless  ocean  embarking,  we  may  well 
behold  without  too  much  of  awe  or  envy  the  sails  of  the 
master-mariners.  Sufficient  to  drift  and  anchor  at  the 
first  enchanted  isle. 

Less   enchanted,   however,    are   even   the   galleries    of 


INTERMEZZO  229 

masterpieces  than  the  quiet  bowers  one  finds  for  oneself 
—  like  that  chapel  in  Arona  where,  unveiling  an  altar- 
picture  in  despite  of  a  tall  candlestick,  I  caught  my 
breath  at  the  sudden  serene  beauty  of  Gaudenzio  Ferrari's 
Holy  Family;  or  like  that  reclusive  Venetian  church, 
where  the  luminous  unity  of  Bellini's  Madonna  and  Saints 
pierces  the  religious  gloom.  Pictures  in  collections  are  as 
unreal  as  objects  in  museums,  less  so  perhaps  to-day  than 
when  each  was  painted  for  a  definite  altar,  refectory,  wall 
or  ceiling,  yet  none  the  less  destroying  one  another's  beau- 
ties. 'Tis  only  in  the  visual  arts  that  we  surrender  our- 
selves to  a  chaos  of  impressions ;  imagine  Beethoven, 
Wagner,  Verdi,  Rossini,  Gounod,  sounding  simultane- 
ously. I  could  have  wept  to  see  how  Simone  Martini's 
Annuyiciation  in  the  Ufiizi  had  suffered  by  being  trans- 
planted to  more  gilded  society.  Gone  was  that  golden 
and  lilied  purity  which  used  to  illumine  the  corridor. 

And  yet  to  see  a  picture  in  its  own  place  is  often 
equally  heartbreaking.  Some  of  the  greatest  pictures 
have  carefully  selected  the  most  sombre  and  inaccessible 
situations. 

Europe  has  perhaps  no  more  melancholy  chamber  than 
that  art-shrine  in  Rome  in  which  the  pleasure-pilgrims 
of  the  world  crick  their  necks  or  catch  bits  of  frescoed 
ceiling  in  hand-mirrors.  'Tis  not  merely  the  bad  light — 
for  even  in  the  best  morning  light  the  Sixtine  Chapel 
is  fuscous  —  nor  the  sombre  effect  of  the  discoloured  and 
chaotic  Last  Judgment^  with  its  bluish  streakiness  and 
dark  background  —  nor  the  dull  painted  hangings,  nor 
the  overcrowding  of  the  ceiling  with  its  Titanic  episodes 
and  figures,  nor  even  tlie  Signorellis  and  Botticellis  round 
the  walls,  thougli  all  contribute  to  the  stuffy  sublimity. 

The  oppressiveness  is  partially  due  to  the  fact  that  the 
architectural  ceiling  that  Michelangelo  painted  —  as  arti- 
ficial as  the.  hangings  —  has  faded  rather  more  than  the 
frescoes   themselves,  so  that  the   figures  seem   to   droop 


230  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

higgledy-piggledy  upon  the  spectator's  head  instead  of 
standing  out  statuesque  in  their  panels  and  spandrils. 
I  dismiss  the  specious  theory  of  a  painting  friend  that 
they  thus  only  hover  the  better,  as  prophets  and  patri- 
archs should.  I  refuse  to  be  crushed  even  by  Michel- 
angelo. I  know  that  a  ceiling  can  soar,  not  menace,  for 
have  I  not  expanded  under  the  gay  lightness  of  the 
Pintoricchio  ceiling  in  the  Borgia  apartments !  Even  the 
heavy  and  gilded  ceiling  of  the  Scuola  di  San  Rocco  at 
Venice,  sombre  enough  in  all  conscience,  by  preserving 
architectural  plausibility,  and  resting  on  painted  pillars, 
escapes  seeming  to  fall  upon  one's  head.  Yet  at  best 
a  ceiling  is  a  poor  place  for  any  save  the  most  simple 
design.  Michelangelo,  or  rather  his  papal  employer,  went 
against  the  principle  of  decoration.  A  room  with  such 
massive  masterpieces  on  its  ceiling  could  not  but  be 
top-heavy.  Moreover  the  art  feeling  can  only  be  re- 
ceived in  comfort.  If  we  are  to  be  transported  outside 
our  bodies,  we  must  not  be  distressfully  reminded  of 
them  by  the  straining  of  neck  muscles.  How  foolish 
and  provoking  of  Correggio  to  put  his  finest  soaring 
figures  not  only  into  a  cathedral  cupola,  but  into  a  cupola 
lit  only  by  a  few  round  windows.  And  his  frescoes  in 
the  other  dome  at  Parma  are  equally  invisible.  One  is 
reduced  to  enjoying  them  in  the  copies.  Michelangelo 
himself  undertook  the  dizzying  task  of  vault-painting  with 
vast  reluctance,  and  complained  in  a  sonnet  that  he  had 
grown  a  goitre,  and  that  his  belly  had  been  driven  close 
beneath  his  chin.  He  achieved  a  miracle  of  art — in  the 
wrong  place.  Perhaps  Julius  II.  was  not  so  Philistine 
in  thinking  more  ultramarine  and  gold-leaf  would  have 
brightened  it  up. 

II 

A  prophet  is  never  without  honour  in  his  own  country 
after  his  fame  has  been  recognised  by  the  world,  indeed, 


INTERMEZZO  231 

his  own  country  will  cling  piously  to  him  after  the 
tide  of  his  larger  reputation  has  receded,  being  as  slow 
to  unlearn  as  to  learn.  Particularly  is  this  true  of 
painters.  And  when  the  artist  has  achieved  the  feat 
of  substituting  himself  for  a  town  in  the  popular  imagina- 
tion, like  Bassano,  Garofalo,  Luini,  Sassoferrato,  Cor- 
reggio,  the  town  thus  snubbed  is  usually  prudent  enough 
to  identify  itself  with  his  glory.  But  it  must  be  humili- 
ating for  a  town  like  Correggio,  once  the  capital  of 
a  principality,  to  owe  its  only  hold  upon  the  present 
to  a  painter  who  did  not  live  there,  and  of  whom  it 
does  not  possess  a  single  picture.  Let  arrogant  cities 
take  warning  :  the  time  may  come  when  their  only  niche 
in  history  will  be  provided  by  some  obscure  citizen  now 
neglected,  if  not  ill-treated  or  repudiated. 

Once  arrived,  then,  the  Old  Masters  are  not  to  be 
shaken  off,  even  after  they  have  departed  again.  Their 
birthplace  or  their  working  centre  makes  a  cult  of  them, 
and  it  is  touching  to  see  them  at  home  each  presiding 
over  a  sola  at  least  of  his  works,  and  though  depreciated 
abroad,  yet  still  at  an  exorbitant  premium  in  his  local 
shrine,  like  some  obscure  paterfamilias  basking  and 
burgeoning  at  the  family  hearth.  Guercino  is  still  a 
god  at  Cento,  his  statue  in  the  piazza,  his  pictures  in  the 
gallery.  Possagno  has  a  shrine  with  casts  of  all  Canova. 
With  what  a  gusto  did  the  cicerones  of  Mantua  talk  of 
Giulio  Romano  !  How  the  name  rolled  from  the  tongue, 
how  it  brightened  a  dingy  fresco  and  glorified  a  dubious 
canvas.  Si!  Si!  Tutto  di  Criulio  Romano !  Poor  Giulio 
Romano !  Not  that  those  giants  of  yours  tumbling  on  their 
heads  in  the  Palazzo  Te  are  as  detestable  as  Dickens  said. 
Those  of  David  and  Goliath  in  the  great  courtyard  are 
even  charming.  And  more  fortunate  than  poor  Guido,  who 
must  share  his  Bologna  with  Francia,  you  have  a  town  to 
yourself.  Even  in  his  own  sola  poor  Guido  is  put  in  the 
shade  by  the  poetry  of  Niccolo  da  Foligno. 


232  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

Moretto  is  properly  the  hero  of  Brescia,  though  not 
born  there,  and  he  dominates  the  Pahizzo  Alartinengo 
with  his  charming  St.  Nicholas  presenting  the  School  Chil- 
dren to  the  Virgin,  and  a  dozen  other  pictures,  as  he  domi- 
nates the  bishop's  palace  and  the  churches.  It  is  rare 
that  so  large  a  proportion  of  a  painter's  work  should  re- 
main at  home,  even  when  the  painter  himself  is  as  home- 
keeping  as  was  Moretto. 

Very  proud  are  they  in  Forli  of  Melozzo,  exhibiting 
engravings  of  all  his  works,  and  even  a  rescued  shop  sign 
of  his  representing  a  pepper-brayer  banging  with  his 
pestle.  Marco  Palmezzani,  too,  is  high  in  honour  in  Forli. 
Correggio,  who  made  his  home  in  Parma,  has  been  adopted 
by  that  city,  and  it  is  one  of  the  few  things  to  the  credit 
of  Marie  Louise  that  she  inspired  this  sacrosanct  treat- 
ment of  his  work,  in  rich  pilastered  frames,  under  sculp- 
tured and  vaulted  ceilings,  with  two  pictures  to  a  room,  or 
in  the  case  of  the  Madonna  della  Scodella  a  room  to  itself. 
Poor  Parmigiano,  the  real  native  of  Parma,  is  thrown  into 
the  shade,  though  there  is  a  Parmigiano  room  in  the 
Pinacoteca  and  a  Parmigiano  statue  in  the  Piazza  della 
Steccata. 

Urbino,  a  city  as  dead  as  Correggio,  except  for  the 
fame  of  its  ancient  majolica,  resembles  it  further  in  not 
possessing  a  single  example  of  the  work  of  its  greatest  son, 
so  that  Raphael's  father,  who  had  the  talent  which  so  often 
sires  a  genius,  pathetically  holds  the  place  of  honour  with 
his  Santa  Chiara  and  other  more  or  less  mediocre  pictures. 
And  yet  there  were  five  years  at  least  in  which  Guido- 
baldo  Montefeltro  might  have  summoned  Raphael  to  that 
famous  Court  which  Castiglione  depicted  as  a  model. 
To-day,  of  course,  the  steep  cobbled  old  city  is  all  Raphael, 
with  the  exception  of  Polidoro  Virgili,  "  the  most  learned 
man  of  letters  of  the  fifteenth  century,"  and  Gianleone 
Semproni  "Epic  Poet"  (!)  ^  Contrada  Raffaello,  and  a 
bronze  bust,  and  a  monument  36  ft.  high,  all  attest  his 


INTERMEZZO  233 

glory.  But  it  would  have  been  far  wiser  to  have  perpetu- 
ated his  exclusion  from  the  Montefeltro  Palace  than  to 
represent  him  by  a  hideous  complete  set  of  cheap  tiny 
photographs  of  his  works,  all  set  side  by  side  in  a  large 
frame  which  stands  in  the  chapel,  together  with  his  skull 
in  a  glass  case  !  At  least,  it  is  not  really  his  skull  —  it 
has  not  even  that  excuse — it  is  merely  a  cast  in  clay, 
though  the  clay  was  taken  from  his  skeleton,  from  the 
cavity  where  once  the  heart  that  loved  all  beauty  had 
pulsed.  And  here,  looking  upon  the  scenes  his  youthful 
eye  had  dwelt  on;  here,  where  one  would  wish  to  sur- 
render oneself  to  memories  of  his  magical  creations,  this 
skull  with  its  perfect  teeth  is  set  to  grin  its  mockery  of 
art  and  life. 

An  anthropologist,  we  are  told  by  an  eminent  historian 
of  art,  supposed  this  cast  to  be  that  of  a  woman,  and  we 
are  invited  to  see  in  it  the  explanation  of  Raphael's 
suavity.  But  I  had  been  satisfactorily  explaining  this 
suavity  myself  by  the  amenities  of  the  tame  landscape 
—  olives,  poplars,  hawthorn,  a  half-dried  river,  pairs  of 
white  oxen  —  as  I  trudged  the  forty  kilometres  from 
Pesaro  to  Urbino,  till  to  my  chagrin  the  character  of  the 
country  changed  and  grew  wilder  and  wilder  as  I  ap- 
proached his  birthplace. 

At  dusk  I  was  climbing  up  to  an  Urbino  towering 
romantically  above  me  with  its  few  twinkling  lights  and 
wafting  down  the  music  of  its  vesper  bells.  My  persua- 
sion that  I  had  explained  Raphael  dwindled  with  every 
painful  step  up  the  "  Contrada  Raffaello,"  probably  the 
steepest  and  worst-paved  street  in  the  world,  and  vanished 
altogether  by  the  time  I  had  climbed  one  of  the  gigantic 
stone  staircases  of  the  rock-hewn  fortress  city.  And  next 
morning  I  looked  from  the  loggia  of  the  great  hook-nosed 
Duke  upon  wonderful  rolling  mountains,  range  upon 
range,  snow-capped  at  the  last,  and  winding  paths  twisting 
among  them  in  a  great  poetry  of  space.     Ha  !     Poetry  of 


234  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

space!  Was  that  not  now  set  down  as  Raphael's  one  real 
claim  to  greatness?  And  it  was  here  no  doubt  he  had 
found  it,  just  as  Piero  dei  Franceschi  had  found  it,  when 
here  at  the  Duke's  invitation.  But  a  hundred  thousand 
other  people — I  suddenly  remembered  —  have  been  born 
or  have  lived  at  Urbino,  and  why  —  I  asked  myself  — 
were  they  not  inspired  to  paint  like  Raphael?  And  a 
hundred  thousand  other  men  have  had  feminine  skulls 
(not  to  mention  women),  and  why  have  they  not  produced 
Transfigurations  and  Schools  of  Athens?  Alas!  I  fear 
the  Taine  method  has  its  limitations.  Rousselot  in  his 
"  Histoire  de  I'Evangile  Eternel "  talks  as  if  Calabria  with 
its  solitary  mountains  and  valleys  could  not  help  produc- 
ing Joachim  of  Flora,  nor  Assisi  St.  Francis.  But  why 
do  these  places  not  go  on  producing  saints  and  mystics  ? 

Ill 

If  a  painter's  skull  is  so  offensive  artistically  and  so 
futile  scientifically,  what  shall  we  say  of  a  poet's  heart  ? 
"  Look  into  thy  heart  and  write  "  may  be  a  sound  maxim, 
but  to  look  into  somebody  else's  heart,  is  another  matter. 
Separate  sepulture  for  the  poet's  heart  is  not  unknown. 
But  the  exhibition  of  a  poet's  heart  as  a  literal  literary  asset, 
or  library  decoration,  is,  I  imagine,  only  to  be  seen  in  the 
University  of  Ferrara.  'Tis  the  heart  of  the  poet  Monti 
who  died  in  1828,  after  having  frequently  resided  in  Ferrara, 
as  a  local  tablet  to  "the  sovereign  poet  of  his  age"  testifies. 
Be  it  known  that  to  Ferrara's  University  turn  the  hearts 
of  all  poets,  inasmuch  as  hither  were  transported  the  bones 
of  Ariosto  —  and  here  a  beautifully  bound  Ariosto  album 
by  all  the  poets  of  the  day  still  awaits  Napoleon's  promised 
attendance  at  the  osseous  installation,  side  by  side  with  a 
lonely  phalange  of  Ariosto  that  was  equally  belated  for 
the  ceremony.  Monti  could  not  resist  the  desire  to  be- 
queath his  heart  to  this  shrine  of  the  Muses,  and  lo  1  there 


INTERMEZZO  235 

I  beheld  it,  in  a  sort  of  air-tight  hour-glass,  a  little  brown 
heart,  preserved  in  alcohol  like  a  physiological  specimen. 
Could  anything  be  more  prosaic  of  a  poet,  nay,  more 
heartless?  Fie  upon  you,  Vincenzo  !  Was  it  not  enough 
that  your  side-whiskers  are  perpetuated  in  the  bust  in  the 
Ambrosian  library  ?  Are  you  an  Arab  that  you  should 
hold  the  heart  the  centre  of  the  soul  ?  Would  you  per- 
suade us  that  this  quaint  ounce  of  flesh  was  the  heart 
that  contracted  and  dilated  with  tragic  passion  as  you 
wrote  your  "  Aristodemo,"  the  heart  that  beat  out  the 
music  of  '-''Bella  Italia,  amate  sponde,'^  the  heart  that  swelled 
with  the  tropes  of  the  Professor  of  Eloquence  at  Pavia  ? 
Was  it  with  these  auricles  and  ventricles  that  you  pumped 
up  j'our  poetry,  was  it  these  cardiac  muscles  that  wrested 
the  laureateship  from  Foscolo  and  Pindemonte  ?  Was  this 
"  the  official  organ  "  of  Napoleon  ? 

Go  to  !  Wear  your  heart  on  your  sleeve,  if  you  will, 
so  long  as  it  throbs  with  your  life,  but  foist  not  upon  us 
this  butcher's  oddment  as  the  essential  you.  Is  it  that 
you  would  abase  us  like  Hamlet's  gravedigger  with  abject 
reminders  of  our  mortality  ?  Pooh  !  a  lock  of  your  hair 
during  your  lifetime  were  no  more  distressing.  Not  with 
this  key  did  Shakespeare  unlock  his  heart.  And  if  we 
wish  to  behold  your  heart,  we  shall  turn  to  your  poems, 
and  see  it  divided  among  many  loves,  equally  susceptible 
to  Dante  and  Homer.  But  this  offal  —  let  it  be  buried 
with  Ariosto's  phalange  ! 

Indeed,  in  justice  to  Italian  taste,  it  should  be  stated 
that  this  heart  has  already  been  buried  once.  The  cour- 
teous librarian  of  the  University  informed  rae  that  at 
Monti's  death  in  1828,  it  was  sent  to  the  library  by  a 
beloved  friend  who  had  placed  it  in  a  pot  of  alcohol.  But 
Cardinal  Delia  Genga  vetoed  its  exhibition  and  it  was 
interred  in  the  Certosa,  under  the  poet's  monument. 
There  it  remained  till  1884,  when  it  was  decided  to  carry 
the  lead  case  in  which  the  heart  was  buried  to  the  library. 


236  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

In  1900  the  case  was  opened  in  the  presence  of  the  author- 
ities and  the  heart  found  splendidly  preserved.  It  was 
therefore  placed  on  view  in  a  chest  belonging  to  the  poet, 
and  containing  papers  of  his.  But  the  sooner  it  is  re- 
moved again  the  better.  That  sort  of  "literary  remains" 
scarce  goes  with  the  atmosphere  of  libraries. 

IV 

But  from  the  heart  in  a  more  romantic  sense  the  most 
learned  atmosphere  is  not  safe,  and  I  am  reminded  of 
another  University  affair  of  the  heart  which  I  stumbled 
upon  in  Bologna. 

As  we  know  from  old  coins,  '''- Bononia  doeet.'"  But  some- 
where about  1320  Bologna  ceased  to  teach.  For  there 
was  a  strike  of  students.  An  old  stone  relief  in  the 
Museo  Civico,  representing  a  crowned  figure  holding  a 
little  scholar  in  his  lap  and  stretching  his  hands  to  a 
kneeling  group,  celebrates  the  reconciliation  of  the  Rector 
with  his  scholars  and  sets  down  in  Latin  a  record  of  the 
episode.  "  The  Scholars  of  our  University  being  recon- 
ciled with  the  city,  from  which  they  had  departed  in 
resentment  at  the  capital  punishment  inflicted  upon  their 
colleague  Giacomo  da  Valenza,  for  the  ravishing  of  Con- 
stanzia  Zagnoni,  by  him  beloved,  the  Church  of  Peace 
was  erected  in  the  year  1322,  in  the  Via  S.  Mamolo  and 
this  memorial  was  placed  there." 

What  a  tragic  romance  !  What  a  story  for  a  novelist, 
the  Church,  the  World  and  the  University  all  inter- 
mingled, what  a  riot  of  young  blood  all  stilled  six  hundred 
years  ago  ! 

The  Doctors  of  that  day  still  sit  in  carven  state  beside 
this  memorial ;  learned  petrifactions,  holding  their  stone 
chairs  for  a  term  of  centuries,  Bartoluzzo  de'  Preti, 
Reader  of  Civil  Law,  who  died  in  1318,  and  Bonandrea 
de'  Bonandrei,  Reader  of  Decretals,  who  died   in    1333. 


INTERMEZZO  237 

The  "  pleasant "  Doctor  tins  Bonandrea  is  styled  ;  season- 
ing, no  doubt,  his  erudition  with  graces  of  style.  I  figure 
him  deeply  versed  in  the  decisions  published  by  Gregory 
IX.  in  1234,  and  a  profound  expounder  of  the  Isidorian 
Decretals. 


LACHRYMiE    RERUM    AT    MANTUA:    WITFI    A 
DENUNCIATION   OF   D'ANNUNZIO 

Befitting  was  it  at  Mantua  to  feel  so  poignantly  the 
lachrymce  rerum.  I  should  perhaps  have  felt  it  at  Virgil's 
own  tomb  at  Naples,  had  that  not  been  so  vague  and 
rambling  a  site  that  no  moment  of  concentration  or 
even  of  conviction  was  possible.  But  the  ancient  Ducal 
Palace  of  the  Gonzagas  in  the  Piazza  Sordello  had  the 
pathos  of  the  unexpected.  Nothing  in  its  exterior  sug- 
gested ruin  and  desolation,  nay  the  scaffolding  across  the 
fagade  spoke  rather  of  restoration  and  repair.  The  tall 
red  brick  arches  of  the  portico  beneath,  the  double  row 
of  plain  straight  windows  in  the  middle,  and  the  top  tier 
of  ornamental  arched  windows,  surmounted  by  the  battle- 
ments, conveyed  an  impression  of  Gothic  solidity  and 
moderate  spaciousness.  It  was  not  till  I  had  walked  for 
many  minutes  through  an  endless  series  of  dilapidated 
chambers  and  mutilated  magnificences  —  propped-up  ceil- 
ings and  walled-up  windows  and  rotting  floors,  and 
marble  and  gold  and  rich-dyed  woods  and  gorgeous 
ceilings,  and  mouldering  tapestries  and  paintings,  and 
musty  grandeurs  multiplied  in  specked  mirrors,  and 
faded  hangings  and  forlorn  frescoes,  and  chandeliers 
without  candles,  and  fly-blown  gilding  and  broken  furni- 
ture and  beautiful  furniture  and  whitewash  and  blackened 
plaster  and  bare  brick  and  a  vast  unpeopled  void  —  that 
there  began  to  grow  upon  my  soul  the  sense  of  a  colossal 
tragedy  of  ruin,  a  monstrous  and  melancholy  desolation, 
an  heroic  grandeur  of  disarray,  a  veritable  poem  of  decay 

238 


LACHRYMiE  RERUM  AT  MANTUA  239 

and  destruction.     Not  the  Alhambra  itself  is  so  dumbly 
eloquent  of  the  passing  of  the  Magnificent  Ones. 

"  Babylon  is  fallen,  is  fallen." 

For  the  interior  answers  not  to  the  exterior,  whether  in 
preservation  or  in  character.  It  is  renaissance  and  ruin, 
with  a  minor  note  of  the  Empire ;  all  the  splendours  of 
the  world  fallen  upon  evil  days.  Only  by  remembering 
the  mutations  of  Mantua  can  one  account  for  this  hybrid 
Cortile  Reale  of  dishevelled  grandeurs,  whose  face  so  be- 
lies its  character  and  its  fortunes. 

The  Palace  was  begun  under  the  dynasty  which  pre- 
ceded the  Gonzagas,  it  saw  all  the  glories  of  the  Renais- 
sance, saw  Mantua  sacked  by  the  Germans,  and  the  Gon- 
zaga  dynasty  extinguished  by  the  Austrians,  and  the  city 
fallen  to  the  French,  and  refallen  to  Austria,  and  caught 
up  into  the  Cisalpine  Republic,  and  then  into  the  Napo- 
leonic Kingdom  of  Italy,  and  then  Austrian  again  till  the 
yoke  was  broken  by  Victor  Emmanuel  and  the  stable  dul- 
ness  of  to-day  established.  It  is  in  fact  a  microcosm  of 
Mantuan  history  from  the  day  Guido  Bonacolsi  laid  the 
first  stone  somewhere  near  the  year  1300.  The  building 
had  not  proceeded  very  far  before  the  Gonzagas  came  into 
power  in  1328,  in  time  to  stamp  the  apartments  with  their 
character,  and  it  is  with  Isabella  d'Este  that  its  most  in- 
ventive features  are  associated. 

A  hundred  and  eighty  rooms,  said  the  janitor,  and 
when  one  remembers  the  crowd  of  resident  courtiers 
and  the  great  trains  with  which  the  Magnificent  Ones 
travelled,  one  should  not  be  astonished  at  the  resem- 
blance of  an  ancient  Palace  to  a  modern  Grand  Hotel. 
Isabella  d'Este's  brother-in-law,  Lodovico  the  Moro,  once 
visited  her  here  with  a  suite  of  a  thousand  persons  and 
that  was  only  half  the  number  with  which  Lodovico's 
brother,  Galeazzo,  Duke  of  Milan,  descended  upon  Flor- 
ence in  1471.     But  no  modern  hotel  could  keep  open  a 


240  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

week  with  such  apartments.  I  do  not  refer  merely  to 
their  dearth  of  conveniences,  but  to  their  mutual  accessi- 
bility, their  comparative  scarcity  of  corridors.  I  do  not 
see  how  a  man  could  go  to  bed  without  passing  through 
another  man's  bedroom.  Grandeur  without  comfort,  art 
without  privacy,  such  was  the  Palace  in  its  peopled  prime. 
Think  of  it  to-day  —  grandeur  in  rags,  art  torn  from  its 
sockets  and  a  lonely  scribe  trailing  through  vaulted  and 
frescoed  emptiness. 

The  portraits  of  the  Gonzagas  are  still  in  the  Hall  of 
the  Dukes,  but  when  I  ascended  the  beautiful  staircase  to 
the  vast  armoury,  I  found  an  aching  void.  The  weapons 
had  been  carried  off  in  the  sack  of  Mantua  —  a  sack  so 
complete  that  Duke  Carlo  on  his  return  had  to  accept  a 
few  sticks  of  furniture  from  the  Grand  Duke  of  Tuscany. 
The  Hall  of  the  Caryatides  preserves  its  paintings,  but  the 
Apartment  of  the  Tapestry  is  a  chandeliered  vacancy. 
The  Apartment  of  the  Empress  (for  Maria  Theresa  crossed 
Mantua's  line  of  life)  is  in  yellow  silk  upholstery  with 
gilded  ceilings  and  an  antique  chandelier  from  Murano, 
but  one  wall  is  relapsed  to  rough  brick,  in  sharp  contrast 
with  the  white  medallioned  ceiling.  The  Refectory  or 
Hall  of  the  Rivers  survives,  a  curious  symphony  in  brown, 
a  lonjr  vaulted  room  with  frescoes  of  Father  Po  and  his 
brother-rivers  and  lakes,  with  grottoes,  and  caryatides, 
and  marmoreal  mosaics,  its  windows  looking  on  a  hang- 
ing garden  —  yea,  Babylon  has  fallen  !  — with  a  piazza  of 
Tuscan  columns  and  a  central  temple. 

A  sense  of  passing  through  a  fantastic  dream-world  be- 
gan to  steal  upon  me  as  I  wandered  through  the  Hall  of 
the  Zodiac  with  its  great  blue  roof  of  stars  and  celestial 
signs  and  ships  drawn  by  dogs,  and  its  walls  gay  with 
figures  in  green  and  gold,  and  came  to  a  bed  with  tall 
green  curtains,  in  which  the  inevitable  Napoleon  had  once 
slept.  He  was  not,  I  mused,  of  those  who  could  not  sleep 
in  a  new  bed.     Followed  a  suite  of  three  rooms  of  the 


LACHRYM^   RERUM  AT  MANTUA  241 

Emperor,  decorated  with  painted  tapestry,  the  real   re- 
moved to  Vienna. 

And  the  nightmare  continued  —  one  long  succession  of 
cold  stone  floors  below  and  crystal  chandeliers  on  high, 
bleakly  glittering.  There  was  a  Hall  of  the  Popes,  bare 
as  a  barrack.  There  was  a  long  shiny  gallery  of  bad  pic- 
tures, which  was  once  a  shrine  of  the  Masters.  There 
was  a  Ducal  Aj^artment  modernised,  but  with  the  old  gilded 
and  bossed  ceiling,  and  dark  cobwebbed  canvases  of  the 
Flemish  school.  There  was  the  Hall  of  the  Archers, 
picturesque  with  the  great  wooden  rafters  of  its  ruined 
roof  and  still  painted  with  illusive  white  pillars,  statues 
and  scenes.  Most  monstrous  of  all  was  the  many-mirrored, 
many-chandeliered  Ball-room  —  its  rows  of  mirrors  reflect- 
ing what  dead  faces,  its  gold  frieze  of  putti  still  echoing 
what  madrigals  and  toccatas,  the  gods  of  Olympus  look- 
ing down  from  its  frescoed  ceiling,  Apollo  driving  his 
chariot  and  four,  and  the  Arts,  the  Sciences,  Parnassus, 
Virgil,  Sordello,  peeping  from  every  arch  and  lunette. 
And  from  the  Hall  of  the  Archers  my  nightmare  led  me 
through  Ducal  Halls  and  still  other  Ducal  Halls,  till  I 
had  passed  through  seven  —  vasty  Halls  of  Death,  with 
marvellous  gilded  ceilings  and  unplastered  walls,  or  with 
plaster  or  whitewash  over  frescoes,  or  with  a  sixteenth- 
century  ceiling  swearing  at  an  elegant  Austrian  bath- 
room (hot  and  cold).  Vivid,  even  in  this  strange  dream, 
stood  out  a  ceiling  intaglioed  with  a  labyrinth  of  gilded 
wood  recording  the  victory  of  Vincenzo  over  the  Turks : 

"  Contra  Turcos  pugnavifc 
Vincenzo  Gonzaga" 

—  and  intertangled  repeatedly  with  the  labyrinth  the  de- 
vice which  d'Annunzio  has  borrowed  for  his  latest  novel 

—  '•'•Forae  che  siforse  che  no''  —  and  reproduced  upon  the 
cover.     An   old  mirror  with  the  glass  half-sooted  over  re- 


242  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

fleeted  these  glories  drearily  and  showed  me  the  only  living 
face  in  this  labyrinthine  tomb. 

And  so  at  last  by  many  rooms  and  ways  and  up  a  little 
staircase  of  eleven  steps  under  a  painted  ceiling,  I  came, 
like  a  soul  that  has  travailed,  to  the  Apartment  of  Paradise, 
the  bower  of  the  beautiful  sweet-voiced  Isabella  d'Este, 
where,  under  her  ceiling-device  "  nee  spe  nee  metu  "  she 
lived  her  married  life  and  her  long  years  of  widowhood, 
with  her  books  and  her  pictures  and  her  antiquities,  play- 
ing on  her  silver  lyre  and  her  lute  and  her  clavichord,  and 
corresponding  with  her  scholars  and  poets,  "  the  first  lady 
of  the  Renaissance."  Piety  for  this  legendary  dame  du 
temps  jadis  seems  to  have  preserved  her  six-roomed 
apartment  much  as  it  was,  with  her  wonderful  polychrome 
wooden  ceilings  and  her  wonderful  doors  fretted  with  por- 
phyry and  marbles  and  her  bird's-eye  views  of  great  cities 
she  had  not  seen — Algiers,  Jerusalem,  Lisbon,  Madrid  — 
and  her  real  view  of  the  panorama  sloping  towards  the 
Po ;  this  combination  of  a  river,  a  garden  and  a  lake  being 
so  stupendo  to  the  inhabitants  of  that  melancholy  region 
of  Italy  that  Isabella's  apartment  took  thence  its  name  of 
Paradise,  much  as  that  dull  Damascus  is  "  the  pearl  of  the 
East."  Her  music-room,  too,  is  intact,  save  for  the  rifling 
of  its  pictures.  Its  intarsia  depicting  dulcimer,  virginal, 
harp,  and  viol,  and  musical  notation,  its  heavy-gilded 
vaulted  ceiling  with  its  musical  staves  and  other  decora- 
tions, and  the  little  bas-relief  showing  herself  with  her 
beloved  instruments,  remain  as  in  the  days  when  Gian 
Trissino  wrote  a  canzone  "  To  Madonna  Isabella  playing 
on  her  lute."  But  the  Mantegnas  she  commanded,  the 
Lottos  and  the  Perugino,  are  at  the  Louvre,  doubtless  at 
the  behest  of  Napoleon,  that  despot  of  a  greater  Renais- 
sance to  whom  even  Isabella's  formidable  brother-in-law, 
the  Moro,  was  a  pygmy,  though  both  of  them  died  in 
prison  and  exile,  as  is  the  habit  of  the  Magnificent 
Ones. 


LACHRYM^  RERUM  AT  MANTUA  243 

Did  my  nightmare  end  in  this  Paradise,  softening  in  this 
quiet  bower  into  a  sleep 

"Full  of  sweet  dreams  and  health  and  quiet  breathing"? 

Nay,  it  grew  only  more  incoherent —  vast  Halls  ruined 
by  being  turned  into  barracks,  the  statues  smashed  by  a 
rude  soldiery,  the  pictures  slashed,  and  only  the  inacces- 
sible splendours  of  the  ceiling  safe  —  though  not  from  the 
damp;  in  the  Hall  of  the  Triumphs  no  Triumph  remaining 
save  the  Triumph  of  Time  and  of  Fate,  Mantegna's  pictures 
of  the  Triumphs  of  Caesar  haled  to  Hampton  Court,  only 
their  empty  oaken  frames  here  gaping;  corridors,  empty 
and  long,  corridors  echoing  under  the  footstep,  corridors 
adorned  with  stuccos  and  rafaellesques ;  the  Hall  of  the 
Moors  with  a  splendid  old  ceiling  and  figures  of  Moors 
on  a  frieze  of  gilded  wood  ;  the  Corte  Vecchia  ;  the  Apart- 
ment of  Troy,  with  crowded  wall-frescoes  by  Giulio 
Romano,  Mantegna,  Primaticcio  ;  the  lovely  salon  of  Troy, 
dismantled,  discoloured,  its  frescoed  legend  of  Troy  unde- 
cipherable, its  ceiling  of  intaglioed  wood  delapidated ;  the 
Hall  of  the  Oath  of  the  Primo  Capitano,  the  Hall  of  the 
Virtues,  Halls  anonymously  mouldering  ;  the  Saletta  of 
the  Eleven  Emperors  denuded  of  Titian's  portraits  to  the 
profit  of  the  British  Museum ;  the  Hall  of  the  Capitani 
with  a  Jove  of  Giulio  Romano  thundering  from  the  ceiling 
but  ironically  damaged  by  real  rainstorms  ;  the  Saletta  of 
Troy,  with  more  Homer  and  Virgil  —  do  you  begin  to  have 
a  sense  of  the  monumental  desolation  ?  But  you  have  yet 
to  figure  me  drifting  in  my  dream  through  the  Court  of 
the  Marbles  and  the  empty  Sculpture  Gallery  with  its 
great  ruined  ceiling  and  the  Cavallerizza  or  Hippodrome, 
the  largest  of  its  time,  now  stilled  of  the  clangour  of  tour- 
nament and  the  plaudits  of  ladies,  and  the  Apartment  of 
the  Boots  and  the  Gallery  over  the  lake,  and  another  gar- 
den hanging  dead,  with  a  Triton  for  a  tombstone  and  owls 
for  mourners,  the  Apartment  of  the  Four  Rooms,  blackened 


244  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

by  the  smoke  of  days  when  they  were  let  as  lodgings,  and 
Halls  and  more  Halls,  and  still  more  Halls  and  Cabinets, 
and  the  Hall  of  the  Shells,  with  its  tasty  pictures  of  fish 
and  venison,  and  the  Hall  of  the  Garlands,  and  the  Apart- 
ment of  the  Dwarfs,  with  their  miniature  chambers  and 
their  staircases  with  small  squat  steps  —  a  quarter  in  itself  ! 

Basta!  The  nightmare  grows  too  oppressive.  Why 
wake  the  buffoons  from  their  pygmy  coffins  of  dwarf 
oak  ? 

Poor  little  jesters  !  Are  their  souls,  too,  I  wonder, 
stunted,  and  is  there  for  them  in  heaven  some  Lilliputian 
quarter,  where  the  Magnificent  Ones  must  make  sport  for 
them  ? 

"  Isabella  Estensis,  niece  of  the  Kings  of  Aragon, 
daughter  and  sister  of  the  Dukes  of  Ferrara,  wife  and 
mother  of  the  Marquises  of  Gonzaga,  erected  this  in  the 
year  1522  from  the  Virgin's  bearing." 

So  runs  —  O  rare  Renaissance  lady — the  Italian  vaunt 
in  the  frieze  round  thy  Grotto,  and  I,  reading  it  from  thy 
little  courtyard,  sit  and  chew  the  cud  of  bitter  fancy. 
Poor  Madonna  Isabella,  whose  inwoven  name  still  clings 
so  passionately  to  thy  boudoir  walls,  in  Avhat  camera  of 
Paradise  dost  thou  hold  thy  court  ?  Methinks  thy  talent 
for  viol  and  harp,  and  that  lovely  singing  voice  of  thine, 
should  find  fit  service  in  that  orchestral  heaven,  where 
thou  —  always  desiderosa  di  cosa  nuova  —  enjoyest  per- 
chance an  ampler  pasture  for  thy  sensibilities.  ^'■Forse  che 
si,forse  che  no.''''  But  from  earth  thou  art  vanished  utterly, 
and  Renaissance  for  thee  is  none.  Where  be  thy  pages 
and  poets  and  buffoons,  thy  singing  seraphs,  thy  painters 
and  broiderers,  thy  goldsmiths  and  gravers,  thy  cunning 
artificers  in  ivory  and  marble  and  precious  woods? 
Where  is  Niccolo  da  Correggio,  thy  perfect  courtier  ? 
Where  be  Beatrice  and  Violante,  who  combed  thy  hair, 
and  Lorenzo  da  Pavia  who  built  thy  organ,  and  Cristoforo 
Romano  who  carved  thy  doorway  and  designed  thy  medal, 


LACHRYMJE   RERUM  AT  MANTUA  245 

and  Galeotto  del  Carretto  who  sent  thee  roundelays  to  carol 
to  thy  lute  ?  Have  all  these  less  substance  than  the  very 
brocades  in  which  thy  soul  was  wont  to  bask  ?  Can  these 
chalcedony  jars  of  thy  Grotto  outlive  them,  these  shells 
mock  their  flippant  fleeting  ?  And  thy  rhyming  and  thy 
reasoning,  and  thy  gay  laughter  and  that  zest  to  ride  all 
day  and  dance  all  night — could  all  this  effervescence  of 
life  settle  into  mere  slime?  And  this  hideous  doubt  — 
this  fluctuant  forse  —  can  we  really  face  it  "wee  spe  nee 
metu  "  ? 

A  horn  sounds  and  steeds  clatter  up  and  down  thy 
graded  staircase.  The  hounds  give  tongue,  the  hawk 
flutters  on  thy  wrist.  The  great  spaces  of  the  Cavallerizza 
fill  with  jousting  paladins ;  dames  in  cloth  of  gold  and 
silver  look  down  from  the  balconies,  princes  and  ambassa- 
dors dispute  their  smiles.  Where  has  it  vanished,  all  that 
allegro  life  — for  I  must  speak  to  thee  by  the  stave  —  that 
gay  gavotte  that  went  tripping  its  merry  rhythm  through 
the  vasty  vaulted  halls  ?  Whither  has  it  ebbed  ?  On 
what  shore  breaks  that  music  ? 

And  that  Mantuan  populace  that  poured  in  like  a  stage- 
crowd  to  hear  its  Dukes  take  the  oath  of  fidelity  —  are 
the  supers,  too,  dismissed  for  ever  with  the  run  of  the 
dynasty?  And  the  Dukes  themselves,  the  haughty  Gon- 
zagas,  is  it  possible  that  they  are  crumbled  even  more  ir- 
redeemably than  those  plasterless  walls  of  their  palace  ? 
Can  it  be  that  Mantegna's  portraits  are  less  phantasmal 
than  the  originals  ? 

"For  the  honour  of  the  illustrious  Lodovico  the  Mag- 
nificent and  Excellent  Prince,  and  unconquered  in  Faith, 
and  his  illustrious  Consort  Barbara,  the  incomparable 
glory  of  women,  his  Andrea  Mantegna,  the  Paduan, 
executed  this  work  in  1473." 

At  last,  at  last  something  lives  and  breathes  in  this 
vast  wilderness  of  shadows.  Bless  you,  Barbara,  incom- 
parable glory  of  women,  with  your  strong  masculine  face  ; 


246  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

and  you,  too.  Magnificent  long-nosed  Lodovico.  Far  have 
I  been  driven  in  my  dream  —  I  am  wandered  even  to  the 
adjoining  ruin  of  tlie  Ducal  Castle  —  but  now  I  am  with 
the  quick,  witli  pigments  whose  life,  though  it  has  its  fad- 
ing, is  a  quasi-imraortality  compared  with  our  transience. 
Go,  get  you  to  my  lady's  chamber,  and  tell  her  to  be 
painted,  for  this  canvas  complexion  is  the  sole  that  will 
last. 

Isabella  d'Este  lives  at  Vienna,  recreated  by  Titian,  and 
at  Paris  Vittore  Fisano  shows  us  what  a  princess  of  her 
house  was  like,  painting  beauty  of  face  and  brocade  against 
a  Japanese  background  of  flowers  and  butterflies.  A  more 
shadowy  life  she  lives  in  this  legend  of  the  princess  of  the 
Renaissance,  which  the  prince  of  Italian  writers  has  revived 
in  his  novel,  "  Forse  che  si,  forse  clie  no,"  a  book  in  which 
my  Italian  friends  tell  me  d'Annunzio  has  won  yet  another 
triumph  of  language,  old  words  being  so  cunningly  min 
gled  with  new  that  the}"  do  not  jar,  but  chime.  D'Annunzio 
is  a  demi-incarnation  of  the  Renaissance  spirit,  exanimate  of 
the  Christian  half,  and  it  is  characteristic  that  the  qualities 
round  which  his  adoration  of  Isabella  plays  are  the  qualities 
not  of  a  great  lady,  but  of  a  great  courtesan  ;  a  leader  of 
the  demi-monde.  But  as  d'Annunzio  lives  in  a  half-world, 
what  can  his  heroines  do  but  lead  it  ?  His  Isabella  d'Este 
—  as  re-created  through  the  worshipful  eyes  of  Aldo  —  is 
the  rival  in  dress  of  Beatrice  Sforza,  Renata  d'Este,  and 
Lucrezia  Borgia  ;  marchionesses  borrow  her  old  clothes  as 
models,  Ippolita  Sforza,  Bianca  Maria  Sforza  and  Leonora 
of  Aragon  are  hopelessly  out-dressed.  Her  sister  Beatrice 
alone  sticks  like  a  thorn  in  her  side  —  Beatrice  whose 
wardrobe  had  eighty-four  accessions  in  two  years  !  But 
Isabella  squeezed  ninety-three  into  one  year  !  !  Lucrezia 
Borgia,  when  she  went  to  marry  Alfonso  d'Este,  had  two 
hundred  marvellous  chemises  ;  Isabella  outdid  her,  and 
even  Lucrezia  must  have  recourse  to  her  for  a  fan  of  gold 
sticks  with  black  ostrich  feathers.     Isabella  invented  new 


LACHRYM^   RERUM  AT  MANTUA  247 

styles  and  new  modes,  and  the  fashion  of  the  carriage  at 
Rome.  Isabella  loved  gems,  particularly  emeralds,  and 
succeeded  in  obtaining  the  most  beautiful  in  existence. 
She  had  her  goldsmiths  at  Venice,  at  Milan,  at  Ferrara. 
She  possessed  not  only  the  finest  jewels,  but  the  finest 
settings,  rings,  collars,  chains,  bracelets,  seals,  and  so 
through  the  list  of  gewgaws  and  baubles.  She  was  the 
admiration  of  France.  She  adored  perfumes  and  com- 
pounded them,  and  masks,  and  sent  Csesar  Borgia  a  hundred, 
and  had  the  most  exquisite  nail-files  for  manicuring,  and 
was  head  over  ears  in  debt  — per  sopra  ai  capelli  —  for  she 
had  a  mad  desire  to  buy  everything  that  took  her  whimsy. 
Has  any  one  ever  better  summarised  the  eternal  courtesan  ? 

Not  a  word  about  the  nobler  Isabella,  the  kind-hearted 
lady  who  was  always  interceding  for  criminals  or  unfortu- 
nates ;  not  a  word  of  the  Isabella  of  unspotted  reputation 
in  an  age  of  demireps  (naturally  d'Annunzio  would  hush 
this  up)  ;  not  a  whisper  of  the  Isabella  who  felt  the  defence 
of  Faenza  against  Ceesar  Borgia  "  as  a  vindication  of  the 
honour  of  Italy."  Scarce  a  hint  of  the  inspirer  of  human- 
ism, the  patroness  of  some  of  the  finest  artists  of  all  time; 
still  less  any  suggestion  of  the  other  Isabella,  the  house- 
wife who  sent  salmon -trout  to  her  friends,  the  philosopher 
who,  when  the  King  of  France  had  entered  Naples,  pointed 
out  to  her  lord  that  the  discontent  of  the  people  is  more 
dangerous  to  a  monarch  than  all  the  might  of  his  enemies 
on  the  battlefield,  and  the  worldly  wise  woman  who,  when 
he  was  hesitating  over  an  inglorious  military  appointment, 
bade  him  take  the  cash  and  let  the  credit  go. 

So  complex  an  Isabella  is  beyond  the  scope  of  d'Annun- 
zio, whose  Isabella  Inghirami  is  an  elemental  creature  of 
passion  and  tragedy. 

'■'■  Forse  che  si,  forse  che  no."  An  inhabitant  of  the  full 
world,  beholding  this  motto  written  and  rewritten  in  the 
ceiling-labyrinth  of  the  Gonzaga  Palace,  might  fall  into 
contemplation  of  the  labyrinth  of  human  life,  and  see  this 


248  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

device  scribbled  all  over  it  ;  he  might  hail  it  as  the  phi- 
losophy of  Montaigne  in  a  nutshell,  and  jump,  if  he  were  a 
novelist,  at  this  magnificent  setting  for  some  tale  of  high 
speculative  fantasy.  But  for  d'Annunzio  there  can  be 
only  one  problem  lying  between  these  mighty  opposites. 
Will  a  woman  yield  to  lier  lover,  or  will  virtue  resist  him? 
To  this  petty  issue  must  these  measureless  words  be 
narrowed,  'Tis  not  even  a  forse.  With  d'Annunzio 
there  can  be  no  negative  in  such  an  alternative.  And  so 
the  mighty  Mantuan  ruin  which  has  known  so  many  deso- 
lations receives  its  last  humiliation,  and  passes  into  litera- 
ture as  a  background  for  lust.     '■'■Sunt  lachrymce  rerum.'''' 

The  true  Isabella  d'Este  has  been  as  much  rarefied  by 
the  Renaissance  legend  as  she  has  been  materialised  by 
d'Annunzio.  For  she  cannot  be  wholly  exonerated  from 
d'Annunzio's  panegyric.  "  Would  to  God,"  she  cried  at 
sight  of  her  brother-in-law's  treasure,  "  that  we  who  are 
so  fond  of  money  possessed  as  much."  It  was  this  treasure 
of  the  Duke  of  IMilan's  that  did,  indeed,  make  her  sister 
Beatrice  a  thorn  in  her  side,  if  also  a  rose  in  her  breast, 
since  darling  Duchess  Beatrice  set  the  pace  at  a  rate 
ruinous  to  the  Marchioness  of  Mantua.  Isabella  could 
not  even  go  to  Venice  at  the  same  time  as  Beatrice,  lest 
all  that  magnificence  (whose  very  leavings  overwhelmed 
me  in  her  Palace)  should  appear  shabbiness.  And  when 
she  lost  her  mother,  she  appeared  more  anxious  about  the 
proper  shade  of  mourning  tlian  the  proper  sentiment  of 
grief.  (How  came  d'Annunzio  to  have  missed  this  trait  ? 
What  a  chance  for  analysis  of  the  eesthetic  temperament !) 
More  pardonable  was  her  anxiety  as  to  the  colour  of  the 
hangings  in  the  Moro's  rooms,  her  hurried  borrowing  of 
plate  and  tapestries,  when  he  impended  with  that  suite  of 
a  thousand.  But  even  for  Beatrice's  death  she  seemed  to 
find  some  satisfaction  in  the  ultimate  reversion  of  her 
much-coveted  clavichord,  and  she  found  it  possible  to 
borrow  a  Da  Vinci  portrait  from  the  Duke's  former  mis- 


LACHRYM^   RERUM  AT  MANTUA  249 

tress  —  her  sister's  cross.  Nor  —  after  the  Duke  was  in 
exile  —  does  it  seem  very  loyal  to  that  fallen  idol  and 
faithful  admirer,  to  have  ingratiated  herself  with  the 
French  conqueror.  That  she  should  rejoice  in  the  election 
to  the  papacy  of  her  profligate  kinsman,  Cardinal  Rodrigo 
Borgia,  was  perhaps  not  unnatural,  but  when  every  allow- 
ance is  made  for  her  virtues,  it  must  be  admitted  that  she 
was  not  utterly  unworthy  of  d'Annunzio's  admiration. 

She  was,  in  brief,  a  Magnificent  One,  and  if  the  Magnifi- 
cent Ones  are,  as  a  rule,  less  monstrous  when  they  are 
women,  at  the  best  they  are  a  seamy  shady  lot,  grinding 
the  faces  of  the  poor,  that  their  babes  may  lie  in  foolish 
cradles  of  gold,  and  building  themselves  lordly  pleasure- 
houses  designed  by  hirelings  of  genius.  Even  Da  Vinci 
prostituted  his  genius  to  plan  a  bath-room  for  that  minx 
of  a  Beatrice,  and  a  pavilion  with  a  round  cupola  for  the 
castle-labyrinth  of  his  Most  Illustrious  Prince,  Signor 
Lodovico.  Yet  Lodovico  must  be  commended  for  his 
taste,  which  is  more  than  can  be  said  for  the  Magnificent 
Ones  of  to-day,  who  are  apt  to  combine  the  libertine  with 
the  Philistine.  Save  for  the  mad  King  of  Bavaria,  I  can 
recall  no  modern  monarch  who  has  had  a  man  of  genius  at  his 
Court.  The  late  King  Leopold  exacted  gold  and  executed 
evil  on  a  scale  beyond  the  dreams  of  the  Moro,  but  where 
were  his  Leonardos  and  Bramantes  ?  Burckhardt  tells  us 
that  the  Renaissance  Despot,  whose  sway  was  nearly 
always  illegitimate,  gathered  a  Court  of  genius  and  learn- 
ing to  give  himself  a  standing  ;  the  pompous  dulness  of 
our  modern  Courts  shows  that  Gibbon's  plea  for  stability 
of  succession  failed  to  reckon  with  the  stagnation  of 
security. 

Prosaic  compared  with  the  fate  of  the  Palace  at  Mantua 
is  the  fate  of  the  Castle  of  Ferrara,  the  cradle  of  Isabella 
d'Este.  'Tis  one  of  those  gloomy  massive  four-towered 
structures  that  recall  the  fables  of  the  giants,  with  its 
moat  still  two  yards  deep  and  its  drawbridge  intact  —  a 


250  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

barbarous  mediaeval  pile,  forbidding  by  daylight  and  sin- 
ister in  the  moon,  with  a  great  clock  that  has  so  much 
leisure  that  it  strikes  the  hour  before  every  quarter. 

Yet  this  grim  fortress,  originally  built  by  a  despot  as  a 
refuge  from  his  subjects,  is  merely  the  seat  of  telegraph 
and  other  civic  offices ;  like  some  antediluvian  dragon 
tamed  and  harnessed,  instead  of  wastefully  slain,  by  the 
St.  George  who  gleams  above  the  portcullis. 

In  the  piazza  before  the  castle,  where  I  saw  only  a  cab- 
rank  of  broken-down  horses,  the  festa  of  this  patron-saint 
of  Ferrara  was  wont  to  set  Barbary  horses  racing  for  the 
pallium,  and  splendid  battle-chargers  ramped  in  that  great 
tournament  which  was  held  by  Duke  Ercole,  Isabella's 
father,  in  honour  of  his  son-in-law,  the  Moro,  and  which 
was  won  by  Galeazzo  di  Sanseverino,  the  model  of  the 
Cortigiano.  Isabella  d'Este  in  her  glad  virginal  youth 
walked  her  palfrey  up  and  down  the  great  equine  stair- 
case, now  given  over  to  messenger  boys  and  clerks. 
Under  the  sportive  ceilings  and  adipose  angels  of  Dosso 
Dossi,  or  within  that  girdling  frieze  of  putti  driving  their 
teams  of  birds,  beasts,  snakes  or  fishes,  pragmatic  council- 
lors hold  debate.  In  the  castle  ball-room  are  held  — 
charity  dances  ! 

But  infinitely  the  saddest  relic  of  the  Magnificent  More 
is  his  former  palace  in  Ferrara.  Why  he  needed  a  palace 
in  Ferrara  I  do  not  know,  unless  to  accommodate  the  over- 
flowings of  his  suite  when  he  visited  his  ducal  father-in- 
law.  Of  this  palace  the  excellent  Baedeker  discourses 
thus :  "  To  the  S.  of  S.  Maria  in  Vado,  in  the  Corso  Porta 
Romana,  is  the  former  Palazzo  Costabili  or  Palazzo  Scrofa, 
now  known  as  the  Palazzo  Beltrami- Calcagnini.  It  was 
erected  for  Lodovico  II  Moro,  but  is  uncompleted.  Hand- 
some court.  On  the  ground-floor  to  the  left  are  two  rooms 
with  excellent  ceiling-frescoes,  by  Ercole  Grandi ;  in  the 
first,  Prophets  and  Sybils  ;  in  the  second,  scenes  from  the 
Old  Testament  in  grisaille." 


LACHRYMiE  RERUM  AT  MANTUA         251 

It  could  not  have  been  done  better  by  an  auctioneer. 
Here  is  the  reality.  A  courtyard  with  arches,  dirty, 
refuse-littered,  surrounded  by  a  barrack  of  slum-dwellings. 
Tlie  first  room  I  penetrated  into  was  palatial  in  size  but 
occupied  by  three  beds,  and  a  stove  replaced  the  old  hearth. 
The  floor  was  of  bare  brick.  Sole  touch  of  colour,  a  canary 
sang  in  a  cage,  as  cheerfully  as  to  a  Magnificent  One.  The 
crone  whose  family  inhabited  this  room  conducted  me  at 
my  request  to  the  chamber  with  the  ceilings  by  Ercole 
Grandi.  She  opened  the  door,  and  —  like  Maria  of  Sicily 
—  entered  crying,  '■'•  E permesso  ? ''''  with  retrospective  cere- 
moniousness,  and  I  followed  her  into  a  vast  lofty  room, 
dingy  below,  but  glorious  above,  though  more  to  faith  than 
to  sight,  for  the  firmament  of  fresco  was  difficult  to  see 
clearly  in  the  gloom.  The  floor  was  of  stone,  and  held  two 
beds,  a  chair  or  two,  a  cradle,  a  stout  dwarfish  old  woman, 
and  a  sprawl  of  children  with  unkempt  heads.  In  the 
adjoining  room  sat  a  sickly  and  silent  woman  working  a 
sewing  machine  under  the  hovering  Sybils  and  Prophets, 
dim  and  faded  as  herself. 

For  those  who  covet  a  Renaissance  chamber,  even  after 
this  exposure  of  the  auctioneer,  let  me  say  that  the  rent  of 
this  last  room  was  thirty-two  scudi  a  year,  Sybils  and 
Prophets  thrown  in. 

The  entire  Palace  Beltrarai-Calcagnini  is,  I  imagine, 
to  be  acquired  for  a  song.  When  I  first  read  in  Ruskin's 
"  A  Joy  For  Ever,"  his  exhortation  to  Manchester  manu- 
facturers to  purchase  palaces  in  Verona  so  as  to  safeguard 
stray  Titians  and  Veroneses,  I  felt  that  the  Anglo-Saxon 
aspiration  to  play  Atlas  had  reached  its  culminating  gro- 
tesquerie.  But  now  that  I  have  seen  the  state  of  the 
Ercole  Grandi  frescoes,  I  feel  that  the  Anglo-Saxon  might 
do  worse  than  step  in,  and  I  cannot  understand  why  Italy, 
so  rigid  against  the  exportation  of  her  treasures,  is  so 
callous  to  their  extinction. 

And  this  is  the  Palace  built  by  the  great  Moro,  who 


252  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

"  boasted  that  the  Pope  Alexander  was  his  chaplain,  the 
Emperor  Maximilian  his  condottiere,  Venice  his  chamber- 
lain, and  the  King  of  France  his  courier " ;  for  whose 
wedding  procession,  which  was  preceded  by  a  hundred 
trumpeters,  Milan  draped  itself  in  satins  and  brocades; 
who  patronised  the  immortals  of  Art ;  and  who  wore  to 
death  in  an  underground  dungeon  in  France. 

An  older  than  Virgil  hath  spoken  the  final  word :   Vanitas 
vanitatum,  omnia  vanitas. 


OF     DEAD    SUBLIMITIES,    SERENE     MAGNIFI- 
CENCES,  AND   GAGGED   POETS 

There  are  few  livelier  expressions  of  vitality  than 
tombs,  especially  tombs  designed  or  commissioned  by  their 
occupants.  These  be  projections  of  personality  beyond 
the  grave,  extensions  of  egotism  beyond  the  body.  The 
Magnificent  Ones  have  invariably  the  mausolean  habit. 
It  is  another  of  their  humilities.  The  majesty  of  death, 
they  know,  is  not  enough  to  cover  their  nakedness.  Moses, 
the  true  Superman,  had  his  sepulchre  hidden  that  none 
might  worship  at  it.  The  false  Superman  ostentates  his 
sepulchre  in  the  hope  that  some  one  may  worship  at  it. 
His  Magnificence  is  only  Serene  in  his  tomb  :  his  life  passes 
in  uneasy  tiptoeings  after  greatness.  Sometimes  his  mor- 
tuary tumefactions  are  softened  by  his  spouse  being  made 
co-tenant  of  his  tomb,  as  in  the  Taj  Mahal  of  Agra,  or  in 
that  beautiful  monument  ordered  by  Lodovico  of  Milan 
for  himself  and  Beatrice  d'Este.  And  sometimes  when 
"  the  Bishop  orders  his  tomb  "  it  may  be  with  an  extenuat- 
ing design  to  beautify  his  church  —  "  ad  ornatum  ecclesise  " — 
as  "  Leo  Episcopus  "  says  of  the  monument  he  designed 
for  himself  in  Pistoja  Cathedral.  Unfortunately  Bishop 
Leo's  worthy  object  is  scarcely  attained  by  the  two  fat 
angels  leaning  sleepily  against  his  sarcophagus,  or  by  the 
skull  and  the  shell-work  over  it,  though  in  comparison 
with  Verrocchio's  adjacent  monument  of  Cardinal  Forte- 
guerra  —  or  rather  the  bust  and  the  black  sarcophagus 
superimposed  upon  the  original  marble  —  the  Bishop's 
tomb  is  a  thing  of  beauty. 

253 


254  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

But  it  is  only  when  the  corpse  has  not  commanded  his 
monument  that  I  am  able  to  endure  its  magnificence.  The 
Cardinal  of  Portugal  in  San  Miniato,  the  poisoned  Pope 
Benedict  in  Perugia,  St.  Dominic  in  Bologna,  St.  Agatha 
in  Venice,  and  even  the  mysterious  Lazaro  Papi,  "  Colonel 
for  the  English  in  Brazil,"  the  "  esteemed  writer  of  verses 
and  history,"  whose  friends  raised  him  so  elaborate  a 
memorial  in  the  cathedral  of  Lucca  in  1835,  all  lie  as  guilt- 
less of  their  monumental  follies  as  Mausolus  himself,  who, 
it  will  be  remembered,  was  the  victim  of  his  designing 
widow.  Nor  could  the  Ossa  Dantis  well  escape  that  domed 
mausoleum  at  Ravenna,  though  they  lay  low  for  a  century 
and  a  half. 

Still  further  removed  from  responsibility  for  his  own 
posthumous  pomp  is  St.  Augustine,  who  with  all  his  in- 
spiration could  not  foresee  the  adventures  of  his  corpse ; 
how  from  Hippo  it  should  come  to  rest  at  Pavia,  by  way 
of  Sardinia,  and  there,  a  thousand  years  after  his  death,  have 
that  marvellous  Area  erected  over  it  by  the  Eremitani. 
Nor  could  St.  Donato,  when  he  slew  the  water-dragon  of 
Arezzo  by  spitting  into  its  mouth,  foresee  the  great  shrine 
embodying  this  and  other  miracles  of  his  which  the  mil- 
lennial piety  of  the  town  would  rear  over  his  desiccated 
dust. 

But  the  Medici,  the  magnificent  Medici !  Not  their 
chapel  in  Santa  Croce,  full  though  it  be  of  the  pomp  of  marble 
and  majolica ;  not  their  San  Marco  monastery  with  their 
doctor-saints  —  St.  Cosmo  and  St.  Damian  —  not  their 
Medici  Palace,  despite  that  joyous  Benozzo  fresco  with  its 
gay  glamour  of  landscape  and  processions  ;  not  the  Pitti 
with  its  incalculable  treasures ;  not  the  Villa  Medici,  nor 
even  the  Venus  herself,  so  reeks  with  the  pride  of  life  as 
all  that  appertains  to  their  tombs.  When  I  gaze  upon  the 
monuments  of  these  serene  Magnificences  in  the  Old  Sacristy 
of  Florence,  with  the  multiple  allusions  to  the  family  and 
its  saints  —  in  marble  and  terra-cotta,  in  stucco  and  bronze, 


OF  DEAD   SUBLIMITIES  255 

in  fresco  and  frieze,  in  high-relief  and  low-relief  —  I  feel  a 
mere  grave-worm.  And  when  I  crawl  into  the  Capella 
dei  Principi  where  stand  the  granite  sarcophagi  of  the 
Grand  Dukes,  there  glances  at  me  from  every  square  inch 
of  the  polished  walls  and  the  pompous  crests  and  rich  mosa- 
ics a  glacial  radiation  of  the  pride  of  life  —  nay,  the  hubris 
of  life.  That  hushed  spaciousness  is  yet  like  an  elaborate 
funeral  mass  perpetually  performed  by  an  orchestra  opu- 
lently over-paid. 

I  wonder  how  in  their  life-time  men  dared  to  apply  to 
these  Magnificent  Ones  the  common  Italian  words  for  the 
body  and  its  operations  and  why  there  was  not  evolved  for 
them  —  as  for  the  bonzes  of  the  Cambodgians  —  a  specific 
vocabulary  to  differentiate  their  eating  and  drinking 
from  the  munching  and  lapping  of  such  as  I.  And  yet 
in  the  New  Sacristy  I  find  consolation.  For,  inasmuch  as 
the  genius  of  Michelangelo  was  harnessed  to  the  funeral  car 
of  his  patrons,  I  perceive  that  here  at  last  they  are  truly 
buried.  They  are  buried  beneath  the  majestic  sculptures 
of  Day  and  Night,  Evening  and  Dawn,  and  'tis  Michel- 
angelo that  lives  here,  not  they.     Peace  to  their  gilded  dust. 

Far  more  reposeful,  at  least  for  the  spectator,  is  Michel- 
angelo's own  burial  place  in  Santa  Croce,  which  is  the 
most  satisfactory  church  the  Franciscans  have  produced, 
and  in  its  empty  spaciousness  an  uplifting  change  from 
the  stuffy,  muggy  atmosphere,  the  tawdry  profusion  of 
overladen  chapels,  which  make  up  one's  general  sense  of  an 
Italian  church.  It  is  not  free  from  poor  pictures  and 
monuments,  and  only  some  of  the  coloured  glass  is  good, 
but  the  defects  are  lost  in  the  noble  simplicity  of  the 
whole  under  its  high  wooden  roof.  Michelangelo's  monu- 
ment is  unfortunately  impaired  by  one  of  the  few  errors 
of  overcrowding,  for  the  frescoes  above  it  make  it  look 
inferior  to  the  Dante  cenotaph,  though  it  is  really  rather 
superior.  Curiously  enough  the  line  anent  the  "  great  poet" 
"  Ingenio  cujus  non  satis  orbis  erat," 


256  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

does  not  come  from  Dante's  monument,  but  from  that  of 
a  certain  Karolus,  presumably  Carlo  Marsuppini ! 

I  have  spoken  of  the  museum  as  the  mausoleum  of 
reality.  But  mausolea,  too,  turn  into  museums ;  in  losing 
their  dead  they,  too,  die  and  become  a  mere  spectacle. 
Such  is  the  melancholy  fate  of  the  Mausoleum  of  The- 
odoric  the  Great  outside  Ravenna,  robbed  of  its  imperial 
heretical  bones  by  avenging  Christian  orthodoxy.  Infi- 
nitely dreary  this  dead  tomb  when  I  saw  it  in  the  centre 
of  its  desolate  plain,  to  which  I  had  trudged  through 
sodden  marshland  that  would  have  been  malarious  in 
summer ;  snowbound  it  lay,  its  arched  substructure 
flooded,  its  upper  chamber  only  just  accessible  by  a 
snow-crusted  marble  staircase  :  a  bare  rotundity,  a  bleak 
emptiness,  robbed  even  of  its  coffin,  uncheered  even  by 
its  corpse.  O  magnificent  Ostrogoth,  conqueror  of  Italy, 
O  most  Christian  Emperor,  when  you  turned  from  the 
splendour  of  your  court  at  Ravenna  to  build  your  last 
home,  you  with  your  imperial  tolerance  could  hardly  fore- 
see that  because  you  held  Christ  an  originated  being,  as 
Arius  had  gone  about  singing,  a  Christian  posterity  would 
scatter  you  to  the  four  winds.  And  that  rival  gigantic 
tomb  in  the  Appian  Way  at  Rome,  does  Csecilia  Metella 
still  inhabit  it,  I  wonder  ?  I  mourn  to  see  such  spacious 
tombs  stand  empty  when  there  are  so  many  living  Mag- 
nificences whom  they  would  fit  to  a  span.  Very  proper 
was  it  to  bury  Beatrice,  the  mother  of  Matilda,  in  the 
sarcophagus  of  a  Pagan  hero.  Mausolea  no  more  than 
palaces  should  remain  untenanted.  Let  them  be  turned 
into  forts  and  castles,  an  you  will,  like  Hadrian's  Tomb 
into  Sant'  Angelo,  or  into  circuses,  like  the  Mausoleum 
of  Augustus  —  sweet  are  the  uses  of  Magnificence  —  but 
to  keep  them  standing  idle  when  there  must  be  so  many 
Magnificences  in  quest  of  a  family  sepulchre  is  a  crime 
against  America.  The  tomb  of  Theodoric  is,  I  fear,  too 
secluded  for  American  taste,  but  the  Exarch  Isaac's  in 


OF  DEAD   SUBLIMITIES  257 

such  cheerful  contiguity  with  town  and  church  may  arride 
the  millionaire  more.  For  a  consideration  the  Exarch's 
own  sarcophagus  miglit  be  had  from  the  Museum,  and  the 
Exarch  scrapped.  Or  there  is  Galla  Placidia's  Mausoleum, 
with  its  Byzantine  mosaics  thrown  in.  Come !  Who 
bids  for  these  rare  curios,  one  of  the  few  links  between 
Antiquity  and  the  Renaissance,  with  their  grotesque  me- 
dieval sincerity.  Remark,  Signori,  that  prefiguration 
of  the  Index  Expurgatorius,  that  bearded  Christ  or  S. 
Lorenzo  (you  pay  your  money  and  you  take  the  choice) 
who  is  casting  into  a  crate  of  serpentine  flames  one  of 
those  Pagan  volumes  for  which  the  Cinquecento  will  go 
hunting  madly.  No,  that  cabinet  does  not  contain  cigar- 
boxes  —  what  did  the  saints  know  of  cigars  ?  —  nor  are 
Marcus,  Lucas,  Matteus,  Joannes,  the  names  of  brands. 
Those  apparent  cigar-boxes,  as  you  might  have  seen  from 
the  strings,  are  holy  manuscripts  triumphant  over  the 
Pagan  volume.  This  naive  draughtsmanship,  Signora,  is 
just  what  makes  them  so  precious  and  your  petty  bids  so 
amazing.  What  is  that  you  say,  Signorina?  Galla 
Placidia  is  still  in  possession  ?  And  two  Roman  Em- 
perors with  her  ?  Nay,  nay,  a  nine  hundred  and  ninety- 
nine  years'  lease  is  all  that  a  reasonable  ghost  may  desire ; 
after  that,  every  tomb  must  be  esteemed  a  cenotaph; 
unless  indeed  the  heirs  will  pay  the  unearned  increment. 
Choose  your  sarcophagus,  Signori,  an  Emperor's  sarcoph- 
agus is  not  in  the  market  every  day. 

But  I  do  not  think  that  even  the  vulgarest  millionaire 
would  desire  his  ashes  to  dispossess  the  Doges  of  Venice, 
or  at  least  not  Giovanni  Pesaro.  The  most  romantic 
auctioneer  might  despair  of  disposing  of  that  portal  wall 
of  the  Frari  which  is  sacred  to  the  Gargantuan  grotesquerie 
of  his  colossal  memorial.  Does  the  whole  world  hold  a 
more  baroque  monument  ?  Going,  going  —  and  how  I  wish 
I  could  say  gone  !  —  that  portal  upheld  by  bowed  negro 
giants  on  gargoyled  pedestals,  with  patches  of  black  flesh 


258  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

gleaming  through  holes  in  their  trousers.  Item,  one  black 
skeleton  surmounted  by  other  unique  curios,  including 
two  giraffes.  Item,  His  Sublimity,  the  Doge  himself,  sit- 
ting up  on  his  sarcophagus,  holding  up  his  hands  as  if  in 
expostulation,  gentlemen,  against  your  inadequate  bids. 
Item,  a  wealth  of  heroic  figures,  and  an  array  of  virtues 
and  vices,  all  life-size.  (Could  be  sold  separately  as  ab- 
solutely incongruous  with  the  negro  portions  of  the  mon- 
ument.) Also,  in  the  same  lot  if  desired,  two  hovering 
angelets,  holding  a  wreath,  suitable  for  any  Christian 
celebrity. 

Alas,  Barnum  is  no  more  and  bidding  languishes.  And 
yet  I  do  not  see  why  the  lot  should  not  be  knocked  down. 
Who  was  this  Pesaro  that  he  should  have  the  right  to  im- 
pose this  horror  on  posterity  ?  Why  should  generations 
of  worshippers  at  the  Frari  be  obsessed  by  this  nightmare  ? 
There  can  be  no  sacredness  in  such  demented  mural  tes- 
taments. And  Time,  wlio  preserved  this,  while  he  has  de- 
stroyed so  many  precious  things,  who  shattered  Leonardo's 
horse  and  melted  Michelangelo's  bronze  Pope,  is  hereby 
shown  of  taste  most  abominable.  History  must  get  a 
better  curator. 

The  black  skeleton  —  I  had  not  thought  before  that 
skeletons  could  be  negro  —  flourishes  a  scroll  which 
ascribes  to  the  Doge  the  wisdom  of  Solomon  and  an  im- 
placable hostility  against  the  foes  of  Christ,  while  a  tablet 
held  by  one  of  the  giant  negroes  announces 

"Aureum  inter  optiiiios  principes  vides." 

Aureum  indeed !  Doubtless  only  some  faint  sense  that 
sheen  and  death  are  discrepant  held  back  the  Doges  from 
being  buried  in  golden  caskets.  The  Doge  lives  again  in 
this  monument,  boasts  the  Latin,  and  one  can  only  reflect 
that  if  the  dogal  taste  reached  this  depravity  by  the  mid- 
dle of  the  seventeenth  century,  '''•actum  est  de  republicd^' 
might  have  been  written  long  before  Napoleon.     Fortu- 


OF  DEAD   SUBLIMITIES  259 

nately  for  the  memory  of  the  Pesaro  family  it  finds  a 
nobler,  if  no  less  bombastic  expression,  in  the  great  Titian 
altar-piece,  the  Madonna  di  Casa  Pesaro,  in  which  the 
Queen  of  Heaven  bends  from  her  throne  to  beam  at  its 
episcopal  representative,  and  St.  Francis  and  St.  Anthony 
grace  by  their  presence  the  symbols  of  its  victory  over  the 
Turk,  while  St.  Peter  pauses  in  his  pious  lection. 

But  the  dead  Doges  lie  mostly  in  SS.  Giovanni  e  Paolo, 
where  their  funeral  service  was  performed.  It  is  the  very 
church  for  Their  Sublimities  —  floods  of  light,  pillared 
splendour,  imposing  proportions.  Their  tombs  protrude 
from  the  walls,  and  their  sculptured  forms  lie  on  their 
backs,  their  heads  on  pillows,  their  feet  comfortably  on 
cushions.  Even  when  we  are  reminded  of  the  finer  things 
for  which  the  Republic  stood,  there  is  an  echo  of  material 

opulence. 

"  Steno,  olini  Dux  Venetiorum,  amator 
Justitise,  Pacis,  et  Ubertatis  anima." 

Uhertatis  anima  !  The  soul  of  prodigal  splendour  !  Even 
spiritual  metaphor  must  harp  on  images  of  Magnificence. 

But  not  every  dead  Doge  consents  to  be  couchant. 
Horatio  Baleono,  who  died  in  1617,  "  hostes  post  innumeros 
stratos,"  has  for  monument  a  cavalier  (of  course,  gilded) 
riding  roughshod  over  writhing  forms  and  a  broken-down 
cannon,  and  Pietro  Mocenigo,  whose  mausoleum  vaunts 
itself  "  ex  hostium  manubiis,"  stands  defiant  on  the  sum- 
mit of  his  sarcophagus,  which  is  upborne  by  a  trinity  of 
figures. 

What  a  family  this  Casa  Mocenigo,  with  its  record  of 
Doges  !  Remove  their  memorials  and  mausolea  from  this 
church  and  you  would  half  empty  it  of  monuments.  Tin- 
toretto, no  less  than  Titian,  was  dragged  at  their  triumphal 
car.  There  is  an  Adoration  of  the  Saviour  at  Vicenza,  which 
might  just  as  well  be  the  adoration  of  the  Doge,  Alvise 
Mocenigo,  who  is  in  the  centre  of  the  picture.  For  though 
he  is  kneeling,  he  has  all  the  air  of  sitting,  and  all  the  other 


260  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

figures  —  the  worshippers,  the  angel  flying  towards  him,  and 
the  Christ  flying  down  to  him  —  converge  towards  him  like 
a  stage-group  towards  the  limelit  hero.  Compare  all  this 
posthumous  self-assertion  with  the  oblivion  fallen  on  Ma- 
rino Faliero,  the  decapitated  Doge  of  Byron's  drama,  whose 
dubious  sarcophagus  was  shown  to  the  poet  in  the  outside 
wall  of  this  church. 

Nor  could  Padua,  Venice's  neighbour,  fall  behind  her  in 
mortuary  magnificence. 

"Nequidque  patavino  splendore  deesset" 

says  a  monument  to  Alessandro  Contarini  in  the  nave  of 
the  cathedral,  a  monument  supported  by  six  slaves  and 
embracing  a  bas-relief  of  the  fleet.  Another  in  the  worst 
dogal  style  exhibits  Caterino  Cornaro,  a  hero  of  the  Cretan 
War  (who  died  in  1674)  in  a  full-bottomed  wig  and  baggy 
knee-breeches,  holding  a  scroll  as  if  about  to  smack  the 
universe  with  it.  Sad  is  it  to  see  so  many  "  eternal  monu- 
ments "  of  faded  fames. 

The  Scaliger  street-tombs  in  Verona  are  at  least  artis- 
tically laudable,  however  ironically  their  Christian  osten- 
siveness  compares  with  the  record  of  the  Family  of  the 
Ladder,  whose  rungs  were  murdered  relatives.  But  even 
had  Can  Signorio  lived  the  life  of  a  saint,  it  would  have 
needed  a  considerable  conquest  of  his  Christian  humility 
before  he  could  have  commissioned  that  portentous  tomb 
of  his  from  Bonino  da  Campiglione.  Knowing  the  Mag- 
nificent One,  Bonino  gave  him  solidity  and  superfluity,  a 
plethora  of  niched  and  statued  minarets  of  saints  and 
virtues,  armed  warriors,  and  bewildering  pinnacles  clothed 
with  figures,  all  resting  on  six  red  marble  columns  spring- 
ing from  a  base  which  supports  the  tomb,  and  is  itself  up- 
borne by  angels  at  each  corner  and  adorned  with  pious 
bas-reliefs.  And  while  the  dead  man  lies  in  stone  above 
his  tomb,  guarded  by  angels  at  head  and  foot,  he  also 
bestrides  his  horse  and  sports  his  spear  on  the  uttermost 


OF  DEAD  SUBLIMITIES  261 

pinnacle  of  his  ladder-crested  memorial,  as  though  making 
the  best  of  both  worlds ;  which  was  indeed  the  general 
habit  of  the  Magnificent,  who  desired  likewise  the  beati- 
tudes of  the  Meek,  and  often  shed  tears  of  sincere  repent- 
ance when  they  could  sin  no  more.  Mastino  della  Scala's 
tomb  is  more  gilded  and  elegant  than  Can  Signorio's, 
though  not  less  assertive  and  bi-worldly.  And  as  for 
the  tomb  of  Can  Grande  — "  Dog  the  Great,"  as  Byron 
translated  him  in  "The  Age  of  Bronze," —  which  is  perched 
over  the  church  door  and  soars  up  into  a  turret,  it  was  — 
on  the  day  I  first  saw  it  —  provided  with  a  long  and  dirty 
Ladder  for  repairing  purposes.  So  that  I  say  Father  Time 
—  if  he  be  a  poor  curator  —  is  at  least  a  fellow  of  infinite 
jest.  One  of  his  jests  is  to  hound  the  Magnificent  dead 
from  pillar  to  post,  from  church  to  monastery,  from  crypt 
to  chapel.  In  the  grave  there  is  rest  ?  Fiddle-faddle ! 
No  body  is  safe  from  these  chances  of  mortality.  Stone 
walls  do  not  a  coffin  make,  nor  iron  bars  a  tomb.  Call  no 
body  happy  until  it  is  burnt.  After  five  centuries  of  rest 
Matilda  of  Tuscany  was  carried  off  from  Mantua  in  a  sort 
of  mortuary  elopement  by  her  great  admirer,  Pope  Urban 
VIII.,  and  hidden  away  in  the  castle  of  S.  Angelo,  till  she 
could  be  inhumed  in  St.  Peter's,  and  it  was  only  the  pride 
of  Spoleto  that  saved  Lippo  Lippi  from  being  sold  to  Flor- 
ence. Napoleon,  in  suppressing  churches,  disestablished 
many  an  ancient  corpse,  and  the  pious  families  of  Verona 
hastened  to  transport  their  sarcophagi  to  the  Church  of 
S.  Zeno  on  the  outskirts.  Hither  must  ride  the  dead 
Cavalli  with  their  equine  scutcheons,  flying  before  the 
World  Conqueror  on  his  white  horse. 

Dismemberment,  too,  befalls  tombs  at  the  hands  of  the 
merry  jester.  The  friars  of  S.  Maria  delle  Grazie  who 
owed  so  much  to  the  great  Sforza  Duke,  broke  up  his 
monument  and  offered  his  effigy  and  his  wife's  for  sale. 
The  more  loyal  Carthusians  snapped  up  Cristoforo  Solari's 
beautiful  sculptures  for  the  beggarly  price  of  thirty-eight 


262  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

ducats,  and  Lodovico  and  Beatrice  in  marble  must  leave 
their  dust  and  make  a  last  journey  to  Pa  via.  A  last  jour- 
ney ?     "C/a'sa.^" 

"  Iterum  et  iterum  translatis,"  sighs  the  monument  over 
the  bones  of  Cino  in  Pistoja  Cathedral,  and  who  knows 
that  the  "  pax  tandem  ossibus  "  is  more  than  a  sanguine 
aspiration  ?  Cino  was  not  the  only  Italian  poet  to  be 
thus  "  translated,"  though  neither  Petrarch  nor  Ariosto 
was  "  translated  "  so  often.  Petrarch  indeed  was  rather 
pirated  than  "translated,"  for  his  right  arm  was  stolen 
from  his  sepulchre  at  Arqua  for  the  Florentines,  and  the 
rest  of  him  is  now  supposed  to  be  in  Madrid  —  a  town 
which  also  holds  that  monarch  of  sanctity  Francesco  di 
Borja,  likewise  minus  an  arm,  for  the  Gesu  of  Rome  kept 
back  that  precious  morsel  of  the  Duke  who  had  entered 
the  kingdom  of  heaven  by  the  rare  gate  of  abdication. 

But  stranger  than  these  mutations  of  mortality  is  the 
fact  that  Italy  holds  the  ashes  of  our  Shelley  and  Keats, 
as  it  held  so  much  of  the  life  of  Byron  and  Browning. 
As  if  Home  had  not  riches  and  memories  to  super-satiety  ! 
A  Protestant  cemetery  seems  indeed  out  of  key  as  much 
with  these  poets  as  with  Rome,  but  that  overshadowing 
Pyramid  of  Cestius  restores  the  exotic  touch,  and  violets 
and  daisies  blot  out  all  but  the  religion  of  beauty,  so  that 
Shelley  could  write  :  "  It  might  make  me  in  love  with 
death  to  think  that  one  should  be  buried  in  so  sweet  a 
place."  It  is  pleasant  to  think  that  only  a  year  later 
Shelley,  however  exiguous  his  ashes,  found  in  that  sweet 
place  the  rest  and  re-union  for  which  his  cor  eordium 
yearned. 

"  'Tis  Adonais  calls !  oh  hasten  thither, 
No  more  let  life  divide  what  Death  can  join  together." 

With  what  a  wonderful  coast  Shelley  has  mingled  his 
memory  —  fig-trees,  olives,  palms,  cactus,  hawthorn,  pines 
bent   seaward,  all  running  down  the  steep  cliff.     What 


OF  DEAD  SUBLIMITIES  263 

enchanting  harmonies  they  make  with  the  glimpses  of 
sea  deep  below,  the  white  villages  and  campaniles,  seen 
through  their  magic  tangle.  As  you  pass  through  the 
sunny,  dusty  village  roads,  the  girls  seem  to  ripen  out  of 
the  earth  like  grapes,  both  white  and  black,  for  there  are 
golden-haired  blondes  as  well  as  sun-kissed  brunettes. 
They  walk  bare-footed,  with  water-jars  poised  on  their 
heads,  sometimes  balancing  great  russet  bundles  of  hay. 
And  the  old  peasant  women  with  Dantesque  features  sit 
spinning  or  lace-making  at  the  doors  of  their  cottages,  as 
they  have  sat  these  three  thousand  years,  without  growing 
a  wrinkle  the  more,  if  indeed  there  was  ever  room  for 
another  wrinkle  on  their  dear  corrugated  faces.  What 
earth  lore  as  of  aged  oaks  they  must  have  sucked  in  dur- 
ing all  these  centuries  ! 

It  is  here  that  one  understands  the  Paganism  of 
d'Annunzio  whose  soul  lies  suffused  in  these  sparkling  in- 
finities of  sun  and  sea  and  sky,  whose  marmoreal  language 
is  woven  from  the  rhythmic  movement  and  balance  of 
these  sculptural  bodies. 

Viareggio,  which  holds  Shelley's  monument,  is  a  place 
of  strange,  twisted  plane-trees.  The  Piazza  Shelley  is  a 
simple  quiet  square  of  low  houses  fronting  a  leafy  garden 
and  the  sea.  It  leads  out,  curiously  enough,  from  the 
Via  Machiavelli.  There  is  a  bronze  bust,  which  admirers 
cover  with  laurel,  and  an  inscription  which  represents 
him  as  meditating  here  a  final  page  to  "  Prometheus 
Unbound."  (Baedeker,  comically  mistranslating  "una 
pagina  postrema,"  represents  him  as  meditating  "  a  post- 
humous page"  !) 

Not  here,  however,  but  in  La  Pineta  is  the  place  to 
muse  upon  Shelley.  It  is  a  thick,  sandy  pinewood  with 
an  avenue  of  planes.  The  pines  are  staggering  about  in 
all  directions,  drunk  with  wind  and  sun.  Very  silent  was 
it  as  I  sat  here  on  a  spring  evening  watching  the  rosy 
clouds  over  the  low  hills  and  the  mottled  sunset  over  the 


264  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

sea.  The  birds  ventured  scarcely  a  twitter  ;  they  knew 
they  could  not  vie  with  Shelley's  skylark. 

Shelley's  epitaph  in  the  Roman  cemetery  is  like  a  soft 
music  at  the  end  of  a  Shakespeare  tragedy. 

"  Nothing  of  me  that  doth  fade 
But  doth  suffer  a  sea-change 
Into  something  rich  and  strange." 

What  a  curious  and  pacifying  fusion  of  poetry  and  wit  ! 
It  reconciles  us  to  the  passing  back  of  this  cosmic  spirit 
into  the  elements  by  way  of  water.  But  what  a  jarring 
perpetuation  of  the  world's  noises  on  the  tombstone  of 
Keats  ! 

"  This  grave  contains  all  that  was  mortal  of  a  young 
English  poet,  who  on  his  death-bed,  in  the  bitterness  of 
his  heart  at  the  malicious  powers  of  his  enemies,  desired 
these  words  to  be  engraven  on  his  tombstone  :  '  Here  lies 
one  whose  name  was  written  in  water.'  " 

Water  again  !  But  water  as  chaos  and  devourer. 
How  ill  all  this  turbulence  accords  with  the  marble 
serenity  of  his  fame,  a  fame  that  so  far  as  pure  poetry  is 
concerned  stands  side  by  side  with  Shakespeare's  !  We 
are  a  good  way  now  from  the  twenty-fourth  of  February, 
eighteen  hundred  and  twenty-one.  A  few  years  more 
and  Keats  will  have  been  silent  a  hundred  years,  and  we 
know  that  his  nightingale  will  sing  for  ever.  AVhat 
profits  it,  then,  to  prolong  this  mortuary  bitterness,  to 
hang  this  dirty  British  linen  on  the  Roman  grave  ?  The 
museum  is  the  place  for  this  tombstone  —  I  could  whisk 
it  thither  like  the  Doge  Pesaro's  wall.  Will  it  save  the 
next  great  poet  from  the  malice  of  his  enemies  ?  Will 
they  speak  a  dagger  less?  Not  a  bodkin  !  The  next 
great  poet,  being  great  and  a  poet,  will  appeal  in  novel 
and  unforeseeable  ways  and  be  as  little  read  and  as  harshly 
reviewed  as  the  marvellous  boy  of  Hampstead  whose 
death  at  twenty-five  is  the  greatest  loss  English  literature 


OF  DEAD   SUBLIMITIES  265 

has  ever  sustained.  Were  it  not  fittest,  therefore,  to 
celebrate  the  centenary  of  this  death  by  changing  his 
epitaph  for  a  line  of  "  Adonais  "  ?  — 

"  He  lives,  he  wakes ;  'tis  Death  is  dead,  not  he." 

The  tragedy  of  Keats  is  sufficiently  commemorated  in 
Shelley's  preface  and  in  the  pages  of  literary  history  and 
in  the  doggerel  of  Byron. 

"  '  Who  killed  John  Keats  ? ' 
'I,'  says  the  Quarterly, 
So  savage  and  Tartarly, 
'  'Twas  one  of  my  feats.' " 

And  Byron  lamented  and  marvelled 

"  That  the  soul,  that  very  fiery  particle. 
Should  let  itself  be  snuffed  out  by  an  article." 

I  do  not  share  this  discontent.  To  be  snuffed  out  by 
an  article  is  precisely  the  only  dignified  ending  for  a 
soul.  This  dualism  of  body  and  spirit  which  has  been 
foisted  upon  us  has  degradations  enough  even  in  health. 
No  union  was  ever  worse  assorted  than  this  marriage  of 
inconvenience  by  which  a  body  with  boorish  tastes  and 
disgusting  habits  is  chained  to  an  intelligent  and  fastidi- 
ous soul.  No  wonder  their  relations  are  strained.  Such 
cohabitation  is  scarcely  legitimate.  Were  they  only  to 
keep  their  places,  a  reasonable  modus  vivendi  might  be 
patched  up.  The  things  of  the  spirit  could  exercise 
causation  in  the  sphere  of  the  spirit,  and  the  things  of  the 
body  would  be  restricted  to  their  corporeal  circle.  But 
alas  !  the  partners,  like  most  married  couples,  interfere 
with  each  other  and  intrude  on  each  other's  domain. 
Body  and  soul  transfuse  and  percolate  each  other.  Too 
much  philosophising  makes  the  liver  sluggish  and  a  tooth- 
ache tampers  with  philosophy.  Despair  slackens  the 
blood  and  wine  runs  to  eloquence.     Body  or  soul  cannot 


266  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

even  die  of  its  own  infirmity ;  the  twain  must  arrange  a 
modus  moriendi,  each  consenting  to  collapse  of  the  other's 
disease.  Thus  a  body  in  going  order  may  be  stilled  by  a 
stroke  of  bad  news,  and  a  spiritual  essence  may  pass  away 
through  a  pox. 

Think  of  the  most  powerful  of  the  Popes,  the  head  of 
Christendom,  the  excommunicator  of  the  Kings  of  France 
and  Spain,  having  to  succumb  to  a  fever ;  think  of  the 
great  French  writer,  in  whose  brain  the  whole  modern 
world  mirrored  itself,  having  to  die  of  a  gas  from  which 
even  his  dog  recovered  ;  think  of  the  giant  German  phi- 
losopher, who  had  announced  the  starry  infinitude  of  the 
moral  law,  degenerating  into  the  imbecile  who  must  tie 
and  untie  his  necktie  many  times  a  minute.  Surely  it 
were  worthier  of  man's  estate  had  Innocent  III.  perished 
of  an  argument  in  favour  of  lay  investiture,  had  Zola  been 
snuffed  out  by  an  anti-Dreyfusard  pamphlet  or  a  romantic 
poem,  had  Kant  succumbed  to  the  scornful  epigram  of 
Herder,  or  even  to  the  barkings  of  the  priests'  dogs  who 
had  been  given  his  name.  And  far  worthier  were  it  of  a 
poet  to  die  of  a  review  than  of  a  jaundice,  of  a  criticism 
than  a  consumption.  Infinitely  more  dignified  was  the 
death  of  Keats  under  the  Quarterly/  than  the  death  of 
Byron  himself  under  a  fever,  which  some  trace  to  a 
microbe,  itself  possibly  injected  by  a  mosquito.  That 
were  an  unpardonable  oversight  of  Dame  Nature,  who  in 
her  democratic  enthusiasm  forgets  that  mosquitoes  are  not 
men's  equals,  and  that  these  admirable  insects  should  be 
blooded  more  economically.  Assuredly  the  author  of 
"  The  Vision  of  Judgment  "  would  have  preferred  to  die 
of  a  stanza  or  a  sting-tailed  epigram. 

Dame  Nature  had  the  last  word  ;  but  was  Byron,  fore- 
seeing her  crushing  repartee,  so  absolutely  unjustified  in 
his  criticisms  and  questionings  of  a  Power  that  held  liim 
as  lightly  as  the  parasite  on  the  hind  leg  of  any  of  the 
fifty  thousand  species    of  beetles  ?     For   if   Fate   treads 


OF  DEAD   SUBLIMITIES  267 

with  equal  foot  on  a  Byron  and  a  beetle,  the  bard  may  be 
forgiven  if  he  takes  it  less  christianly  than  the  coleopteron. 
Byron  is  "  cheap  "  to-day  in  England,  and  while  Greece 
celebrates  the  centenary  of  his  arrival  and  Crete  calls  on 
his  name,  while  Italy  is  full  of  his  glory,  his  hotels  and  his 
piazzas,  while  Genoa  is  proud  that  he  lived  in  II  Paradiso 
and  the  Armenian  Monastery  at  Venice  still  cherishes  the 
memory  of  his  sojourn  there  to  learn  Armenian,  and  every 
spot  he  trod  is  similarly  sacred,  the  Puritan  critic  reminds 
us  that 

"  The  gods  approve 
The  depth  and  not  the  tumult  of  the  soul." 

Yes,  we  know,  but  when  a  poet  is  disapproving  of  the 
gods  their  standards  matter  less.  And  we  are  men,  not 
gods,  that  their  standards  should  be  ours.  Humani  sumuSy 
and  nothing  of  Byron's  passion  and  pain  can  be  alien  from 
us.  This  tumult  of  the  soul,  who  has  escaped  it  ?  Not 
Wordsworth,  assuredly,  who  wrote  those  lines.  Only  the 
fool  hath  not  said  in  his  heart,  "  There  is  no  God."  Even 
Cardinal  Manning  said  it  on  his  death-bed.  Not  that 
death-bed  conversions  are  worth  anything.  Matthew 
Arnold  was  apt  to  give  us  Wordsworth  as  the  reposeful 
contrast  to  the  bold,  bad  Byron.  But  the  calmness  of 
Wordsworth  is  only  in  his  style,  and  if  his  questionings 
are  cast  in  bronze  they  were  often  forged  in  the  same 
furnace  as  Byron's,  and  fused  through  and  through  with 
the  pain 

"  Of  all  this  unintelligible  world." 

Poets,  even  the  austere,  have  to  learn  in  suffering  what 
they  teach  in  song.  Only  the  suffering  is  always  so  much 
clearer  than  what  it  teaches  them.  And  then,  as  Heine 
says,  comes  Death,  and  with  a  clod  of  earth  gags  the 
mouth  that  sings  and  cries  and  questions. 

" Aber  ist  Das  eine  Antwort  ?  " 


VARIATIONS   ON   A  THEME 

Among  these  multitudinous  Madonnas^  and  countless 
Crucifixions,  and  Entombments  innumerable,  who  shall  dare 
award  the  palm  for  nobility  of  conception  ?  But  there  is 
a  minor  theme  of  Renaissance  Art  as  to  which  I  do  not 
hesitate.  It  is  the  Pietd  theme,  but  with  angels  replacing 
or  supplementing  the  Madonna  who  cherishes  the  dead 
Christ,  and  it  is  significant  that  the  finest  treatment  of  it  I 
have  seen  comes  from  tlie  greatest  craftsman  who  treated  it 

—  to  wit,  Giovanni  Bellini.  His  Cristo  Sorretto  da  Angioli 
you  will  find  painted  on  wood  —  a  tavola  —  in  the  Palazzo 
Communale  of  Rimini.  The  Christ  lies  limp  but  tranquil, 
in  the  peace,  not  the  rigidity,  of  death,  and  four  little  an- 
gels stand  by,  one  of  them  half  hidden  by  the  dead  figure. 
The  exquisite  appeal  of  this  picture,  the  uniqueness  of 
the  conception,  lies  in  the  sweet  sorrow  of  the  little  angels 

—  a  sorrow  as  of  a  dog  or  a  child  that  cannot  fathom 
the  greatness  of  the  tragedy,  only  knows  dumbly  that  here 
is  matter  for  sadness.  The  little  angels  regard  the  wounds 
with  grave  infantile  concern.  Sacred  tragedy  is  here  fused 
with  idyllic  poetry  in  a  manner  to  which  I  know  no 
parallel  in  any  other  painter.  The  sweet  perfection  of 
Giovanni  Bellini,  too  suave  for  the  grim  central  theme  of 
Christianity,  here  finds  triumphant  and  enchanting  justi- 
fication. 

It  is  perhaps  worth  while  tracing  how  every  other 
painter's  handling  of  the  theme  that  I  have  chanced  on 
fails  to  reach  this  lyric  pathos. 

Bellini  himself  did  not  perhaps  quite  reach  it  again, 
though  he  reaches  very  noble  heights  in  two  pictures  (one 

268 


VARIATIONS   ON  A  THEME  269 

now  in  London  and  the  other  in  Berlin),  in  which  the  re- 
duction in  the  number  of  angels  to  two  makes  even  for 
enhancement  of  the  restful  simplicity,  while  in  the  Berlin 
picture  there  is  a  touching  intimacy  of  uncomprehending 
consolation  in  the  pressing  of  the  little  angelic  cheeks 
against  the  dead  face.  But  the  fact  that  in  both  pictures 
one  angel  seems  to  understand  more  or  to  be  more  exer- 
cised than  the  other  contributes  a  disturbing  complicacy. 
The  serene  unity  is,  indeed,  preserved  by  Bellini  in  his 
Pietd  in  the  Museo  Correr  of  Venice.  But  here  the  three 
young  angels  supporting  the  body  are  merely  at  peace  — 
there  is  nothing  of  that  sweet  wistfulness. 

For  a  contrary  reason  the  woodland  flavour  is  equally 
absent  from  its  neighbour,  a  picture  by  an  unknown 
painter  of  the  Paduan  school.  Here  the  peace  is  exchanged, 
not  for  poetry  but  tragedy.  *  The  Christ  is  erect  in  his 
tomb,  and  the  two  haloed  baby  angels  who  uphold  his 
arms  are  the  one  weeping,  the  other  horror-struck.  The 
horror  is  accentuated  and  the  poetry  still  further  lessened 
in  an  anonymous  painting  in  a  chapel  of  S.  Anastasia  in 
Verona,  where  boy  angels  are  positively  roaring  with 
grief.  Nor  is  the  poetry  augmented  in  that  other  anony- 
mous painting  in  the  Palazzo  Ducale  of  Venice,  where  one 
angel  kisses  the  dead  hand  and  the  other  the  blood-stained 
linen  at  the  foot.  In  Girolamo  da  Treviso's  picture  in 
the  Brera  one  child  angel  examines  the  bloody  palm  and 
the  other  lifts  up  the  drooping  left  arm  with  its  little 
frock.  Great  round  tears  run  down  their  faces,  which  are 
swollen  and  ugly  with  grief.  Still  more  tragic,  even  to 
grotesquerie,  is  an  old  fresco  fragment  in  an  underground 
church  in  Brescia,  where  the  little  angels  are  catching  the 
sacred  blood  in  cups  —  those  cups  invented  by  Perugino 
and  borrowed  even  by  Raphael.  Francesco  Bissolo,  in 
the  Academy  of  Venice,  preserves  the  tranquillity  of 
Bellini,  but  by  making  the  angels  older  loses  not  only  the 
seductive   naivete   but   the    whole  naturalness,   for  these 


270  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

angels  are  old  enough  to  know  better,  one  feels.  They 
have  no  right  to  such  callousness.  Raphael's  father  in 
his  picture  in  the  cathedral  of  Urbino  escapes  this  pitfall, 
for  his  adult  angels  bend  solicitously  over  the  Christ  and 
support  his  arms  from  above.  But  Lorenzo  Lotto,  though 
he  gives  us  innocent  child-angels,  tumbles  into  an  analogous 
trap,  for  he  forgets  that  by  adding  a  Madonna  and  a 
]Masrdalen  in  bitter  tears  he  transforms  tliese  untroubled 
little  angels  into  little  devils,  who  have  not  even  the  curi- 
osity to  wonder  what  in  heaven's  name  their  mortal  elders 
are  weeping  over.  In  Cariani's  so-called  Deposizione  at 
Ravenna  one  little  angel  does  weep  in  imitation  of  the 
mortals,  leaning  his  wet  cheek  on  the  Christ's  dead  hand 
—  "  tears  such  as  angels  weep  "  —  but  he  only  repeats  the 
human  tragedy,  and  might  as  well  be  a  little  boy.  Two 
older  angels  howl  and  grimace  in  Marco  Zoppo's  picture 
in  the  Palazzo  Almerici  of  Pesaro,  while  the  haloed,  long- 
ringleted  head  of  the  Christ  droops  with  slightly  open 
mouth  and  a  strange  smile  as  provoking  as  Mona  Lisa's. 
Francia  in  the  National  Gallery  gives  us  a  red-eyed  Ma- 
donna with  one  calm  and  one  compassionate  angel,  and 
Zaganelli  in  the  Brera  vies  with  Bellini  in  the  vague, 
tender  wonderment  of  the  child  angels  who  lift  up  the 
arms,  but  the  picture  is  second-rate  and  the  angels  are 
little  girls  with  bare  arms  and  puffed  sleeves.  Nor  is  it  a 
happy  innovation  to  show  us  the  legs  of  the  Christ  sprawl- 
ing across  the  tomb. 

Marco  Palmezzano,  with  inferior  beauty,  also  trenches 
on  Bellini's  ground ;  but  not  only  is  the  Christ  sitting  up, 
not  quite  dead,  but  one  of  the  two  child  angels  is  calling 
out  as  for  aid,  so  that  the  restful  finality  of  Bellini  is  van- 
ished. Still  nearer  to  the  Bellini  idea  approaches  a 
picture  in  the  Academy  of  Venice  attributed  to  Marco 
Basaiti  and  an  unknown  Lombardian.  But  if  this  avoids 
tragedy,  the  turn  is  too  much  in  the  direction  of  comedy. 
The  child  angels  are  made  still  more  infantine,  so  that 


VARIATIONS  ON   A  THEME  271 

there  is  neither  horror  nor  even  perturbation,  merely  a 
shade  of  surprise  at  so  passive  a  figure.  One  plays  with 
the  Christ's  hair,  the  other  with  his  feet — the  Blake-like 
tenderness  is  not  absent,  but  the  poetry  of  this  utter  un- 
consciousness is  not  so  penetrating  as  the  wistful  yearning 
of  the  Bellini  angels  before  some  dim,  unsounded  ocean  of 
tragedy.  This  precise  note  I  did,  indeed,  once  catch  in 
a  corner  of  Domenichino's  Madonna  del  Mosario,  where  a 
baby  surveys  the  crown  of  thorns  ;  but  this  is  just  a  side- 
show in  a  joyous,  thickly  populated  picture,  and  the 
Christ  is  not  dead,  but  a  live  bambino,  who  showers  down 
roses  on  the  lower  world  of  martyrdom  and  sorrow. 

He  is  almost  too  dead  in  the  fading  fresco  of  the  little 
low-vaulted,  whitewashed,  ancient  church  of  S.  ISIaria 
Infra  Portas  in  Foligno.  A  great  gash  mutilates  his  side, 
his  head,  horribly  fallen  back,  lies  on  the  Madonna's  lap, 
his  legs  and  arms  droop.  The  mother's  long  hair  hangs 
down  from  her  halo,  she  clasps  her  hands  in  agony,  and 
a  child  angel  on  either  side  looks  on  commiseratingly. 
Strange  to  say,  this  conserves  the  poetry,  despite  the 
horror,  though  the  horror  removes  it  out  of  comparison 
with  Bellini's  handling. 

In  Genoa  I  found  three  more  variations  on  the  theme, 
two  in  the  cathedral,  the  first  with  four  angels,  all  gravely 
concerned,  and  the  second  with  quite  a  crowd  of  little 
boys  and  angels,  nearly  all  weeping.  One  of  the  little 
angels  has  taken  off  the  crown  of  thorns  —  a  good  touch 
in  a  bad  picture.  The  third  variant  is  by  Luca  Cambiaso, 
and  in  the  Palazzo  Rosso,  with  a  single  agitated  boy  angel. 
A  Pietd  in  Pistoja  takes  its  main  pathos  from  its  lonely 
position  on  the  staircase  of  the  fusty  town  hall :  a  last 
rose  of  summer,  all  its  companions  are  faded  and  gone, 
all  save  one  pretty  lady  saint  blooming  in  a  vast  ocean  of 
plaster.  Even  its  own  Madonna  and  Apostles  are  half 
obliterated ;  but  the  boy  angel  remains  in  a  curious  pos- 
ture :  he  has  got  his  head  betwixt  the  legs  of  the  Christ, 


272  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

and  with  his  arms  helps  to  sustain  the  drooping  figure. 
Still  more  original  touches  appear  in  Andrea  Utili's  picture 
in  Faenza.  Here  the  Christ  has  his  arms  crossed,  and  his 
halo,  tilted  back  over  his  crown  of  thorns,  gleams  weirdly 
in  red  and  gold,  and  on  his  tomb  rest  pincers  and  a  ham- 
mer. The  two  youthful  angels  are  deeply  moved ;  one 
holds  a  cross  and  the  other  three  nails. 

If  any  painter  could  vie  in  enchantment  with  Giovanni 
Bellini  it  is  Crivelli,  and,  indeed,  there  are  fascinating 
things  in  his  Pietd  in  the  Brera,  idyllic  sweetness  in  the 
angels,  original  decorative  touches  in  the  book  and  burn- 
ing taper,  and  masterly  imagination  in  the  ghastly  lack 
of  vitality  with  which  each  dead  hand  of  the  Christ  droops 
on  the  tender  living  hand  of  an  angel.  Had  only  the 
angels  been  a  little  younger,  this  would  have  been  as 
sweetly  lyrical  as  Bellini.  From  Michelangelo  we  have 
only  a  sketch  of  the  subject,  with  his  wingless  child 
angels,  over  whom  stands  the  jNIater  Dolorosa  with  useless 
outspread  arms,  that  should  have  been  helping  the  poor 
little  things  to  support  their  burden.  In  Guido  Reni's 
Pietd  at  Bologna  her  hands  droop  in  folded  resignation, 
while  one  angel  weeps  and  one  adores  and  pities.  I  fear 
the  presence  of  the  Madonna  and  other  mortals  destroys 
the  peculiar  celestial  poetry,  though  of  course  the  con- 
junction of  mortals  and  angels  brings  a  poetry  of  its  own. 

Tura's  treatment  of  the  theme  in  Vienna  I  have  not  seen. 
But  Vivarini  breaks  out  in  a  new  direction.  His  two 
angels  fly  from  right  and  left  towards  the  tomb,  under  full 
canvas,  so  to  speak.  But  it  is  a  pattern  et  proeterea  nihil. 
More  poetic  in  its  originality  is  a  picture  of  the  Veronese 
school  in  the  Brera,  showing  us  two  baby  angels,  half  curi- 
ous, half  apprehensive,  unfolding  the  Christ's  winding- 
sheet.  But  it  is  a  dark,  poorly  painted  picture.  Another 
new  invention  is  Garofalo's  in  the  same  gallery.  He  gives 
us  a  crowd  of  commonplace  weeping  figures  in  a  pictur- 
esque landscape,  and  his  angel  is  a   sweet  little   cherub 


VARIATIONS  ON  A  THEME  273 

aloft  on  a  pillar  over  the  heads  of  the  mourning  mob. 
But  the  angel  might  be  a  mere  architectural  decoration, 
for  all  his  effect  upon  the  picture. 

Thus  have  we  seen  almost  every  possible  variation  tried 

—  adult  angels  and  young  angels  and  baby  angels,  calm 
angels  and  callous  angels,  lachrymose  angels  and  vociferous 
angels,  helpless  angels  and  hospital  angels,  boy  angels  and 
girl  angels,  and  only  one  artist  has  seen  the  sole  permuta- 
tion which  extracts  the  quintessential  poetry  of  the  theme 

—  the  high  celestial  tragedy  unadulterated  by  human 
grief,  and  sweetened  yet  deepened  by  angels  too  young  to 
understand  and  too  old  to  be  unperturbed,  too  troubled 
for  play  and  too  tranquil  for  tears. 

And  it  is  to  that  incarnation  of  evil,  Sigismondo  Mala- 
testa,  that  we  owe  this  masterpiece  of  lyric  simplicity,  for 
'twas  the  Magnificent  Monster  himself  that  commissioned 
it  —  His  rolling  and  reverberating  Magnificence,  Sigis- 
mondo Pandolfo  Malatesta  di  Pandolfo  —  whose  polypho- 
nous,  orotund  name  and  the  black  and  white  elephants  of 
whose  crest  pervade  the  splendid  temple  which  he  remod- 
elled at  Rimini  for  the  glory  of  God.  And  lest  the 
world  should  forget  'twas  he  to  whom  heaven  owed  the 
delicious  Pagan  reliefs  by  the  pillars,  or  the  now-faded 
ultramarine  and  starry  gold  of  the  chapels,  each  first  pilas- 
ter bears  in  Greek  the  due  inscription : 

TO    THE    IMMORTAL    GOD 
SIGISMONDO    PANDOLFO    MALATESTA    DI    PANDOLFO 

(Pray  do  not  pause  here  —  epigraphs,  like  telegrams,  are 
not  punctuated.) 

PRESERVED   FROM   MANY   OF   THE    GREATEST   PERILS   OP   THE    ITALIAN   WAR 

ERECTED    AND    BEQCEATHED    MAGNIFICENTLY    LAVISH 

AS    HE    HAD    VOWED    IN    THE    VERY    MIDST    OF    THE    STRUGGLE 

AN    ILLUSTRIOUS    AND    HOLY    MEMORIAL 

T 


274  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

No  less  reflexive  was  his  apotheosis  of  the  frail  Isotta,  of 
whom  he  first  made  an  honest  woman  and  then  a  goddess. 
What  wonder  if  his  critics  carped  at  the  "  Disottte,"  the 
"  divine  Isotta,"  he  wrote  over  her  tomb,  in  lieu  of  the 
conventional  "  Dominse  Isottae  Bonse  Memorise  "  I  But 
one  must  do  the  bold,  bad  eondottiere  the  justice  to  say  that 
wliile  two  angels  bear  this  inscription  over  her  in  gold, 
his  own  tomb  is  comparatively  modest.  It  is  Isotta 
whose  tomb  is  supported  by  shield-bearing  elephants  and 
culminates  in  flourishes  as  of  elephants'  trunks,  Isotta  who 
stands  over  her  altar  in  the  guise  of  a  gold-winged  angel. 
Malatesta's  patronage  of  Giovanni  Bellini  was  not  his 
only  contribution  to  the  arts,  for  a  cluster  of  poets  found 
hospitality  at  his  court  and  burial  at  his  temple  —  with  a 
careful  inscription  that  it  was  Sigismondo  Pandolfo  Mala- 
testa  di  Pandolfo  who  buried  them  —  though  these  seem 
to  have  plied  the  trade  of  Laureate,  if  I  may  judge  from 
the  volume  published  at  Paris,  "  LTsotteo."  I  cannot 
pretend  to  be  read  in  Porcellio  de'  Pandone  or  Tommaso 
Seneca  or  Basinio  of  Parma.  But  Bellini's  tavola  suffices 
to  make  me  say  with  riddling  Samson,  "  Out  of  the  strong 
Cometh  forth  sweetness." 

For  this  is  perhaps  the  teleological  purpose  of  the  Magni- 
ficent Ones,  to  play  the  Maecenas  to  some  starveling  artist 
or  penurious  poet.  There  is  in  the  santuario  of  the  Mala- 
testa  temple  a  fresco  of  this  Sigismondo.  He  is  seen  in 
the  flush  of  youth,  gay  in  a  brocaded  mantle  and  red  hose, 
but  somewhat  disconcertingly  on  his  knees  before  a  crowned 
figure  —  his  patron  saint  according  to  some,  the  Emperor 
Sigismondo  more  probably.  Let  us  call  it  that  sovereign 
fate  to  which  even  megaphonious  Magnificence  must  bow. 
Almost  divine  in  his  lifetime,  within  a  few  years  the  Mag- 
nificent One's  character  commences  to  decay,  as  if  that 
too  could  not  resist  the  corruption  of  death.  Happy  the 
prince  of  whom  some  not  malodorous  shred  of  reputation 
remains  a  century  after  his  death.     The  evil  that  men  do 


VARIATIONS   ON  A  THEME  275 

lives  after  them,  the  good  they  have  not  done  is  oft  interred 
with  their  bones. 

Yes,  there  is  a  pathos  in  the  Magnificent  Ones.  When 
I  consider  how  their  autocosm  ensnared  tliem  with  a  sense 
of  their  own  perdurability,  lured  them  into  engaging 
painters  and  architects  and  statuaries  to  express  their 
triumphant  sense  of  timeless  energising,  and  then  ebbed 
away  from  them,  leaving  them  putrid  carbonates,  phos- 
phates, and  silicates,  while  the  work  of  Beauty  lived  on 
and  lives,  having  used  these  momentarily  swollen  creatures 
as  its  channel  and  tool,  then  I  find  it  in  me  to  pity  these 
frog-bulls  of  egotism,  so  cruelly  bemocked  and  deluded. 

Before  parting  with  the  Pietd  theme  I  would  remark 
that  in  the  Italian  galleries  the  name  Pietd  is  often  —  with 
apparent  inaccuracy  —  given  to  pictures  of  the  dead  Christ 
alone  in  his  tomb.  One  of  the  most  curious  pictures  of 
this  sort  I  came  upon  in  the  gallery  of  Faenza,  where 
Christ  stands  in  his  tomb,  yet  still  nailed  on  the  Cross, 
from  either  end  of  which  depends  a  scourge.  I  found  the 
same  design  in  the  centre  of  a  little  stone  shield  over  a 
building  marked  as  the  "  Mons  Pietatis  "  of  Faenza.  And 
this  set  me  speculating  whether  such  an  image  as  a  symbol 
of  the  Monte  di  Pieta  was  due  to  the  mere  suggestiveness 
of  the  word  Pietd,  or  whether  there  was  a  more  mystical 
connection  implied  between  the  Crucifixion  and  the  loan- 
offices  instituted  in  Italy  by  Bernardino  da  Feltre  to  frus- 
trate the  usury  of  the  Jews.  It  is  the  Monte  di  Pieta  of 
Treviso  that  shelters  the  Entombment  ascribed  to  Giorgione. 
It  seems  a  long  way  from  Golgotha  to  the  pawn-shop,  yet 
we  still  talk  of  pledges  being  redeemed. 


HIGH  ART   AND   LOW 

"  Pictures 
Of  this  Italian  master  and  that  Dutchman." 

James  Shirley  :  "  The  Lady  of  Pleasure." 

To  come  in  the  Uffizi  upon  a  Dutch  collection,  to  see  the 
boors  of  Jan  Steen,  the  tavern  peasants  of  Heemskerck, 
the  pancake-seller  of  Gerard  Dou,  the  mushrooms  and  but- 
terflies of  Marcellis  Ottone,  is  to  have  first  a  shock  of 
discord  and  then  a  breath  of  fresh  air  and  to  grow  suddenly 
conscious  of  the  artificial  atmosphere  of  all  this  Renais- 
sance art.  Where  it  does  not  reek  of  the  mould  of  crypts 
or  the  incense  of  cathedrals  or  the  pot-pourri  of  the  cloister, 
it  is  redolent  of  marmoreal  sa/ows,  it  is  the  art  of  the 
Magnificent  Ones.  Moroni's  Tailor  marks  almost  the 
social  nadir  of  its  lay  subjects,  and  our  sartor  was  no 
doubt  a  prosperous  member  of  his  guild.  There  are  two 
courtesans  in  Carpaccio,  but  indistinguishable  from  count- 
esses, in  a  rich  setting  of  pilasters  and  domestic  pets. 
Guido  Reni  painted  his  foster-mother,  but  it  is  the  ex- 
ception which  proves  the  rule.  And  the  rule  is  that 
Demos  shall  appear  in  Art  only  as  the  accessory  in  a 
sacred  picture,  like  the  old  woman  with  the  basket  of 
eggs  in  Titian's  Presentation  in  the  Temple^  or  the  servants 
in  the  many  sacred  suppers  and  banquetings  beloved  of 
Veronese.  That  the  Holy  Family  itself  was  of  lowly 
status  is,  of  course,  ignored  except  here  or  there  by  Tin- 
toretto or  Signorelli  or  Giovanni  Bellini,  and  the  wonderful 
gowns  and  jewels  worn  by  the  carpenter's  wife,  according 
to  Fra  Angelico  or  Crivelli,  would  be  remarkable  even  on 
a  Beatrice  d'Este  or  a  Marie  de'  Medici.  Who  would 
ever  think  that  Raphael's  Sposalizio  of  the  Virgin  was  the 

276 


HIGH  ART  AND   LOW  277 

marriage  of  a  Bethlehem  artisan  to  a  peasant  girl  ?  Even 
the  carpenter's  barefootedness  —  the  one  touch  of  naked 
truth — seems  a  mere  piece  of  hymeneal  ritual,  in  face  of 
that  royal  company  of  princesses  and  their  suites,  that 
functioning  High  Priest.  No  ;  insistence  on  the  humble- 
ness of  the  Holy  Family  hardly  tallied  with  the  Christian- 
ity of  the  Renaissance,  or  even  with  the  psychology  of  the 
poor  believer,  who  loves  to  dress  up  his  gods  as  Magnificent 
Ones  and  for  whom  to  adore  is  to  adorn.  Aristocracy  is  the 
note  of  Italian  painting  —  the  Holy  Family  takes  formal 
precedence,  but  the  Colonnas  and  the  Medicis  rank  their 
families  no  less  select.  Tlie  outflowering  of  Dutch  art 
was  like  the  change  from  the  airless  Latin  of  the  scholars 
to  the  blowy  idioms  with  which  real  European  literature 
began.  Italian  art  expressed  dignity,  beauty,  religion  ; 
Dutch  art  went  back  to  life,  to  find  all  these  in  life  itself. 
It  was  the  efiflorescence  of  triumphant  democracy,  of  the 
Dutch  Republic  surgent  from  the  waves  of  Spain  and 
Catholicism  as  indomitably  as  she  had  risen  from  the 
North  Sea.  Hence  this  sturdy  satisfaction  with  reality. 
Rembrandt  painted  with  equal  hand  ribs  of  beef  and  ribs 
of  men.  The  Low  Countries  invented  the  fruit  and  flower 
piece  and  the  fish  and  game  piece.  That  Low  Art  hails 
from  the  nether  lands  is  not  a  mere  coincidence.  Holland 
was  less  a  country  than  a  piece  of  the  bed  of  the  sea  to 
which  men  stuck  instead  of  limpets.  Cowper  says,  "  God 
made  the  country  and  man  made  the  town,"  but  the  Dutch 
proverb  sa3's,  "God  made  the  sea  and  we  made  the  shore." 
'Twas  no  braggart  boast.  The  Dutchman  had  made  for 
himself  a  sort  of  anchored  sliip,  and  the  damps  and  va- 
pours drove  him  oft  from  the  deck  to  the  warm  cabin, 
where,  asquat  on  plump  cushions  with  bnxom  vroio  and 
solid  food  and  stout  liquor,  he  met  the  mists  with  an  an- 
swering cloud  from  his  placid  pipe.  And  the  art  he  en- 
gendered reflected  this  love  for  cosy  realities,  and  found 
a  poetry  in  the  very  peeling  of  potatoes.      No  voice  of 


278  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

croaking  save  from  the  frogs  of  his  marshes.  Let  your 
Leopardis  croak  'mid  their  suuny  vineyards,  let  your 
Oberuianns  sulk  on  their  stable  mountains  ;  Mynheer  is 
grateful  to  be  here  at  all,  to  have  outwitted  the  waters  and 
dished  the  Dons.  And  so  never  has  earthiness  found  more 
joyous  expression  than  in  his  pictures.  What  gay  content 
witli  the  colours  of  clothes  and  the  shafts  of  sunshine,  and 
the  ripe  forms  of  women,  and  the  hues  of  meats  and  fishes  I 
O  the  joy  of  skating  on  the  frozen  canals  !  O  the  jolly 
revels  in  village  taverns!  Hail  the  ecstasy  of  the  Ker- 
messe  !  "  How  good  is  man's  life,  the  mere  living."  "  It 
is  a  pleasant  thing  to  have  beheld  the  sun."  These  are 
the  notes  of  Dutch  art,  which  is  like  a  perpetual  grace  to 
God  for  the  beauty  of  common  things.  And  if  the  painters 
are  concerned  so  much  with  the  problems  of  light,  if 
Rembrandt  was  the  poet  of  light,  was  it  not  because  the 
Dutchman  had  always  in  his  eye  varying  effects  of  light, 
shifting  reflections  and  scintillations  in  the  ubiquitous 
canals,  kaleidoscopic  struggles  of  sunlight  with  mist  and 
fog  ?  The  Venetians  too,  those  Hollanders  of  Italy,  are 
notable  for  their  colour,  in  contrast  with  the  Florentines. 
Even  in  the  Dutch  and  Flemish  images  of  doom  I  have 
thought  to  detect  a  note  of  earth-laughter,  almost  an  irre- 
sponsible gaiety.  Pierre  Breughel  paints  the  Fall  of  the 
Angels  as  a  descent  to  lower  forms  —  the  loyal  angels  beat 
the  rebels  down,  and  they  change  as  they  fall  into  birds, 
beasts  and  fishes,  into  frogs  and  lizards,  and  even  into 
vegetables.  There  are  bipedal  carrots,  and  winged  ar- 
tichokes and  bird-tailed  pomegranates.  'Tis  as  if  the 
worthy  painter  was  anxious  to  return  to  the  kitchen,  to  his 
genre  subjects.  Or  may  we  sniff  a  belated  Buddhism  or  a 
premature  Darwinism  ?  Instead  of  a  sacred  picture  we 
get  a  pantomimic  transformation  scene  :  metamorphosis 
caught  grotesquely  in  the  act.  This  Fall  of  the  Angels 
seems  a  favourite  Flemish  subject  —  one  reads  almost  an 
allegory  of  Art  hurled  down  from  heaven  to  earth. 


HIGH  ART  AND  LOW  279 

The  same  sportive  fantasy  frolics  it  over  the  Flemish  hell. 
De  Vos  gives  us  a  devil  playing  on  the  fluted  nose  of  a 
metamorphosed  sinner.  In  a  triptych  of  Jerome  Bosch, 
the  Last  Judgment  is  the  judgment  of  a  Merry  Andrew  who 
turns  the  damned  into  bell-clappers,  strings  them  across 
harpstrings  or  claps  their  mouth  to  the  faucets  of  barrels 
till  they  retch.  So  far  goes  the  painter's  free  fancy  that 
he  invents  airships  and  submarines  for  the  lost  souls  to 
cower  in,  unwitting  of  the  day  when  these  would  hold  no 
terrors  for  the  manes  of  erring  aeronauts  and  torpedoists. 

Italian  art  even  in  the  childish  grotesqueries  of  its  In- 
ferno never  falls  so  low  as  this  freakish  farrago.  One 
cannot  help  feeling  that  the  Italians  believed  in  hell  and 
the  Netherlanders  made  fun  of  it. 

One  of  these  extravaganzas  of  Bosch  has  drifted  to  Ven- 
ice, though  this  Temptation  of  St.  Antony  (of  which  there 
is  a  replica  in  Brussels)  is  also  attributed  to  Van  Bles. 
The  nude  ladies  coming  to  the  saint  with  gifts  are  most 
unprepossessing,  and  what  temptation  there  is  in  the  whirl 
of  carnival  grotesques  I  cannot  understand.  No  doubt 
some  allegory  of  sin  lurks  in  these  goblin  faces,  with  their 
greedy  mouths  full  of  strange  creatures,  and  in  this  great 
head  with  black-tailed  things  creeping  in  through  eye  and 
mouth,  with  frogs  suspended  from  its  earrings  and  a  little 
town  growing  out  of  its  head.  Such  uncouth  ugliness  has 
no  parallel  in  Venice,  unless  it  be  a  German  Inferno  with 
a  belled  devil.  From  such  puerilities  one  turns  with  relief 
to  the  coldest  and  stateliest  conventions  of  High  Art. 

And  yet  Dutch  art  and  Italian  are  not  wholly  discrepant : 
the  link,  as  I  have  said,  comes  through  the  minor  figures 
of  religious  scenes,  or  even  occasionally  through  the  major. 
A  Dutch  homeliness  lurks  shyly  in  the  background  of 
Italian  art,  and  at  times  appears  boldly  in  the  foreground. 
From  one  point  of  view  nothing  could  be  more  Dutch 
than  the  innumerable  jNladonnas  who  suckle  their  Bambini. 
Nor  do  their  haloes  destroy  their  homeliness.     The  peas- 


280  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

ant  girl  of  Tintoretto's  Annunciation  in  S.  Rocco  wears  a 
halo,  but  neither  that  nor  the  angel  bursting  through  the 
crumbling  brick  of  the  door  can  prevent  this  scene  from 
being  a  Dutch  interior  with  a  cane  chair.  Realism, 
smuggled  in  under  the  cloak  of  religion,  is  none  the  less 
realism,  and  when  Moretto  shows  us  the  Bambino  about 
to  be  bathed  by  mother  and  nurse,  and  paints  us  a  basket 
of  belly-bands,  he  has  given  us  a  genre  picture  none  the 
less  because  rapt  saints  and  monks  look  on  in  defiance  of 
chronology,  and,  perched  on  a  bank  of  cloud  over  a  ro- 
mantic landscape,  angels  sing  on  high.  Even  as  early  as 
Giotto  the  nurse  who  presides  at  The  Birth  of  the  Virgin 
is  washing  the  baby's  eyes.  Very  curious  and  realistic  is 
the  pastoral  study  which  Luca  Cambiaso  styled  Adoration 
of  the  Shepherds.  And  in  Veronese,  for  all  his  magnifi- 
cence, and  in  Carpaccio,  for  all  his  fairy-tale  atmosphere, 
and  above  all  in  Bassano,  for  all  his  golden  glow,  we  get 
well-established  half-way  houses  between  High  Art  and 
Low.  Under  the  pretext  of  The  Supper  in  Emmaus 
Bassano  anticipates  all  Dutch  art.  Here  be  cats,  dogs, 
plucked  geese,  meat  in  the  pan,  shining  copper  utensils 
scattered  around,  the  pot  over  the  glow  of  the  fire,  the 
rows  of  plates  in  the  kitchen  behind.  What  loving  study 
of  the  colour  of  the  wine  in  the  glasses  of  the  guests,  and 
of  their  robes  and  their  furs  !  These  things  it  is  that, 
with  the  busy  figures  behind  the  bar  or  stooping  on  the 
floor,  fill  up  the  picture,  while  the  Christ  on  a  raised  plat- 
form in  the  corner  bulks  less  than  the  serving-maid,  and 
the  centre  of  the  stage  is  occupied  by  a  casual  eater,  his 
napkin  across  his  knees.  If  this  sixteenth-century  picture 
is  Venetian  in  its  glowing  colour  and  its  comparative  in- 
difference to  form,  it  is  Dutch  in  its  minuteness  and  home- 
liness. 

The  same  love  of  pots  and  pans  and  animals  glows  in 
The  Departure  of  Jacob.,  with  his  horse  and  his  ass  and  his 
sheep  and  his  goats  and  his  basket  of  hens,  and  even 


HIGH  ART  AND   LOW  281 

beguiles  Bassano  into  attempting  a  faint  peering  camel. 
But  not  even  the  presence  of  God  in  a  full  white  beard 
can  render  this  a  sacred  picture.  It  is,  however,  in  his 
favourite  theme  of  The  Animah  going  into  the  Ark  that 
Bassano  brings  the  line  between  the  sacred  and  secular 
almost  to  vanishing  point.  Although  Savonarola  preached 
on  the  Ark  with  such  unction,  as  became  the  prophet  of  a 
new  deluge,  the  just  Noah  himself  seems  the  least  religious 
figure  in  the  Old  Testament,  perhaps  because  —  after  so 
mucli  water  —  he  took  too  much  wine.  There  is  even  a 
tradition  recorded  by  Ibn  Yachya  that  after  the  Flood  he 
emigrated  to  Italy  and  studied  science.  At  any  rate 
Bassano  always  treated  him  as  a  mere  travelling  showman, 
packing  his  animals  and  properties  for  the  next  stage.  In 
a  picture  at  Padua  Noah's  sons  and  daughters  are  doing 
up  their  luggage  —  one  almost  sees  the  labels —  and  Noah, 
with  his  few  thin  white  hairs,  remonstrates  agitatedly 
with  Shem  —  or  it  may  be  Ham  or  Japhet  —  who  is  appar- 
ently muddling  the  boxes.  A  lion  and  lioness  are  treading 
the  plank  to  the  Ark,  into  which  a  Miss  Noah  is  just  push- 
ing the  leisurely  rump  of  a  pig,  which  even  the  lions  at  its 
tail  fail  to  accelerate.  Countless  other  pairs  of  every 
description,  including  poultry,  jostle  one  another  amid  a 
confusion  of  pots,  wash-tubs,  sacks,  and  bundles,  the  birds 
alone  finding  comfortable  perching-room  on  the  trees. 
Mrs.  Noah  wears  her  hair  done  up  in  a  knot  with  pearls 
just  like  the  Venetian  ladies,  and  a  billy-cock  hat  lies  on  one 
of  the  bundles.  In  his  Sheep-shearing  (in  the  Pinacoteca 
Estense  of  Modena)  Bassano  throws  over  all  pious  pre- 
tences and  becomes  unblushingly  Dutch  —  nay,  double- 
Dutch,  for  he  drags  in  agricultural  operations  and  cooking 
as  well  as  sheep-shearing. 

But  it  is  in  Turin  that  Bassano's  Batavianism  runs  riot. 
For  his  market-place  is  a  revel  of  fowls,  onions,  prezels^ 
eggs,  carcases,  sheep,  rams,  mules,  dogs  gnawing  bones, 
market-women,  chafferers,  with  a  delicious  little  boy  whose 


282  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

sliirt  hangs  out  behind  his  vivid  red  trousers.  And  his 
Cupid  at  the  Forge  of  Vulcan  is  an  extravaganza  in  copper 
pots  and  pans ;  and  yet  another  market  masterpiece  is  an 
inventory  of  all  he  loved —  butcher's  meat  and  rabbits  and 
geese  and  doves,  and  lungs  and  livers,  and  gherkins  and 
melons,  and  cocks  and  hens,  and  copper  pans  and  pewter 
spoons,  and  a  coav  and  a  horse  and  an  owl  and  lambs,  all 
jostling  amid  booths  and  stalls  on  a  pleasant  rustic  back- 
ground as  in  a  Tintoretto  Paradise  of  luscious  paint- 
abilities. 

Gaudenzio  Ferrari  has  the  same  love  of  sheep,  and  these, 
with  horses  and  dogs,  force  their  way  into  his  pictures. 
The  Bible  is  an  encyclopasdia  of  themes,  and  even  had  any 
subject  been  wanting,  apocrypha  and  sacred  legend  would 
have  provided  it.  For  his  pet  lambs  Ferrari  goes  to  the 
copious  broidery  on  the  Gospel,  and  his  Angels  predicting 
the  Birth  of  Maria  is  really  a  study  in  sheep  on  the  back- 
ground of  a  domed  and  towered  Italian  city.  Giotto  too 
had  attempted  sheep,  though  they  are  more  like  pigs,  and 
dogs,  though  they  are  elongated  and  skinny ;  his  camel 
with  grotesque  ears  and  a  sun-bonnet  one  can  forgive. 

The  lives  of  the  saints  supplied  other  opportunities  for 
"  Dutch"  pictures  in  the  shape  of  miracles  at  home.  Tit- 
ian himself  stooped  to  record  the  miracle  of  putting  on 
again  the  foot  which  the  man  who  had  kicked  his  mother 
cut  off  in  remorse.  And  in  the  same  Scuola  of  the  Confra- 
ternity of  St.  Antony  at  Padua  you  may  see  the  neglectful 
nurse  carrying  safely  to  its  parents  at  table  the  babe  she 
had  allowed  to  boil. 

And  yet  despite  all  these  manifold  opportunities,  no 
Italian  seems  quite  to  get  the  veracious  atmosphere  of  the 
Dutch  and  to  achieve  the  dignity  of  Art  without  depart- 
ing from  the  homeliness  of  Nature.  No  Italian  has  brought 
Christ  into  the  street  so  boldly  as  Erasmus  Quellinus  in 
that  picture  in  the  Museo  Vicenza  in  which  a  girl  with  a 
basket  of  live  hens  on  her  head  stops  to  watch  the  fat 


HIGH  ART  AND  LOW  283 

Dutch  baby  sleeping  in  its  mother's  arms.  Despite  the 
unreal  presence  of  adoring  saints  in  the  crowd,  there  is 
here  a  true  immanence  of  divinity  in  everyday  reality. 
The  sixteenth-century  Italian  Baroccio  did  indeed  depict 
a  Dutch  peasant-feast  in  his  Last  Supper  in  the  cathedral 
of  Urbino,  with  its  bare-legged  boy  cook  stooping  for  plat- 
ters from  a  basket  and  its  dog  drinking  at  a  bronze  dish,  but 
its  homeliness  is  marred  by  the  hovering  of  angels.  Realism 
unadorned  is  essayed  by  Fogolino  in  his  Holy  Family  in 
Vicenza,  with  the  carpenter's  shop,  the  rope  of  yarn,  the 
hammer ;  with  a  boy  Christ  in  a  black  tunic  saying  grace 
before  a  meal  of  boiled  eggs,  pomegranate,  and  grapes, 
washed  down  by  a  beaker  of  red  wine ;  with  the  Madonna 
bending  solicitously  over  him,  her  wooden  spoon  poised 
over  her  bowl;  but,  alas  !  the  whole  effect  is  of  a  cheap 
oleograph. 

But  then  Fogolino  was  not  a  great  painter,  and  it  would 
have  been  interesting  to  see  a  superb  craftsman  like  Paul 
Veronese  try  his  hand  at  homely  nature,  unadorned  by 
great  space-harmonies  and  decorative  magnificences.  As 
it  was,  he  had  the  delight  of  a  Dutchman  in  dogs  and  cats, 
copper  pots  and  jugs,  and  earthen  pans  and  groaning  ta- 
bles and  glittering  glasses,  and  these  it  is  which  fascinate 
him,  far  more  than  the  spiritual  aspect  of  the  Supper  in 
the  House  of  the  Pharisee^  so  that  even  when  lie  wishes 
to  paint  the  soul  of  the  pink-gowned  Venetian  Magdalen, 
he  paints  it  through  a  little  bowl  which  she  overturns  in 
her  emotion  at  kissing  the  feet  of  Christ.  This  is  why 
meals  are  the  prime  concern  of  Veronese,  obsess  him  more 
than  even  his  noble  pillared  rhythms  and  arclied  perspec- 
tives. How  eagerly  he  grasps  at  The  Marriage  of  Cana 
and  Tlie  Disciples  at  Emmaus  and  The  Meal  in  the  House 
of  Levi,  with  wiiich  that  hold-all  of  the  Bible  supplied  him  ! 
Spaces  and  staircases,  arches  and  balconies  and  lordly 
buildings,  all  the  palatial  poetry  of  Verona,  with  its  fair 
women  and  rich-robed  men  —  these  are  his  true  adoration. 


284  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

and  he  paints,  not  Jesus,  but  the  loaves  and  fishes.  Nay, 
it  may  ahnost  be  said  that  unless  there  be  food  in  the  pic- 
ture Veronese  grows  feeble,  and  must  have  pillars  at  least 
to  prop  him  up.  See,  for  example,  his  Susannah  and  the 
Elders,  with  no  trace  of  food  and  only  a  wall  to  sustain  him. 
When  the  Biblical  cornucopia  was  wholly  depleted  of  its 
food-stuffs,  he  had  to  forage  for  manna,  especially  when 
the  need  of  decorating  a  monastic  refectory  was  added  to 
his  own  passion  for  provender.  One  of  his  discoveries  was 
Tfie  Banquet  of  Gregory  the  G-reat,  which  is  in  the  Monas- 
tery of  the  Madonna  del  Monte  outside  Vicenza  and  which 
is  based  on  the  legend  that  Gregory  invited  twelve  poor 
men  to  eat  with  him  and  Christ  turned  up  as  one  of  them. 
But  Christ,  who  is  removing  the  cover  from  a  fowl,  is  less 
striking  than  Paul  Veronese  himself  —  who  stands  on  the 
inevitable  balcony  with  his  own  little  boy  —  and  at  best  a 
mere  item  in  the  rhythm  of  pillars  and  staircases  and  sky- 
effects.  Nothing  brings  out  the  defect  of  Veronese  as  a 
religious  painter  so  clearly  as  a  comparison  of  his  Disciples 
at  Emmaus  with  Titian's.  Titian  too  gives  us  fine  shades 
of  bread  and  fruit  and  wine,  and  even  a  little  "  Dutch  " 
dog  under  the  table ;  Titian  too  plays  with  pillars  and  a 
romantic  background.  But  how  his  picture  is  suffused 
with  the  spirit  I  These  things  know  their  place,  are  ab- 
sorbed in  the  luminous  whole.  A  certain  blurred  softness 
in  the  modelling,  a  certain  subdued  glow  in  the  colouring 
—  as  of  St.  Mark's  —  give  mystery  and  atmosphere.  The 
food  is,  so  to  speak,  transubstantiated. 

Even  Moretto's  Supper  at  Emmaus  (in  Brescia)  is  supe- 
rior to  Veronese's,  though  his  Christ  in  pilgrim's  cockle-hat 
and  cloak  has  to  the  modern  eye  the  look  of  an  officer  with 
a  cocked  hat  and  a  gold  epaulette. 

But  Veronese  is  not  the  only  Italian  who  would  have 
been  happier  as  a  lay  painter.  I  am  convinced  that  some 
of  the  romanticists  of  the  Renaissance  were  born  with 
the   souls  of   Dutchmen,  and    these,  as   it   happens,  the 


HIGH  ART  AND   LOW  285 

very  men  who  have  not  worn  well ;  a  proof  that  they 
were  out  of  their  element  and  gave  up  to  romance 
and  religion  what  was  meant  for  realism.  Take  Guido 
Reni,  the  very  synonym  of  a  fallen  star,  the  Aurora  in 
Rome,  perhaps  his  one  enduring  success  —  though  even 
here  Aurora's  skirt  is  of  too  crude  a  blue,  and  there  is 
insufficient  feeling  of  mountain  and  sea  below  her.  His 
portrait  by  Simone  Cantarini  da  Pesaro  shows  him  with 
a  short  grey  beard,  a  black  doublet,  a  lawn  collar,  and 
a  rather  pained  look  —  there  is  nothing  of  the  Aurora 
in  this  sedate  and  serious  figure.  And  better  than 
either  his  violent  Caravaggio  martyrology  or  his  later 
mythologic  poesy  I  find  his  portraits  of  his  mother  and 
his  foster-mother ;  the  mother  in  black  with  a  black 
turn-down  collar,  a  muslin  coif,  and  grey  hair  thinning 
at  the  temples,  and  tlie  foster-mother  a  peasant  woman 
with  bare  and  brawny  arms.  The  St.  Peter  Reading 
in  the  Brera  is  also  a  strong  study  of  an  old  man's  head. 
Moroni  had  the  good  sense  or  the  good  fortune  to 
shake  himself  almost  free  of  religious  subjects  and  to 
produce  a  Tailor  who  is  worth  tons  of  Madonnas,  but 
even  he  did  not  utterly  escape  the  church-market,  and 
when  one  examines  such  a  picture  as  his  lladonna  and 
Son,  St.  Catherine,  St.  Francis  and  the  Donor  in  the 
Brera,  one  rejoices  even  more  that  an  overwhelming 
percentage  of  his  product  is  pure  portraiture.  For  the 
holy  women  in  this  picture  are  quite  bad ;  St.  Francis 
is  rather  better,  but  the  real  Moroni  appears  only  in  the 
smug  donor  who  prays,  his  clasped  hands  showing  his 
valuable  ring.  Here,  of  course,  the  painter  had  simply 
to  reproduce  his  sitter.  As  much  can  be  said  of  Garofalo 
and  many  another  religious  painter,  whose  "Donors" 
often  constitute  the  sole  success  of  their  pious  composi- 
tions. 

Lorenzo  Lotto,  too,  should  perhaps  have  confined  him- 
self to  portraiture,  if  of  a  fashionable  clientele.    His  pretty 


286  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

Adoration  of  the  Infant  might  be  any  mother  adoring 
any  infant.  Near  it  —  in  the  Palazzo  Martinengo  in 
Brescia  —  Girolamo  Romanino  has  a  frightful  fresco  in 
tlie  grand  manner,  and  quite  a  good  portrait  of  an  old 
gentleman ;  which  suggests  that  Romanino  too  should 
have  avoided  the  classic.  There  is  an  altar-piece  of  his 
in  Padua  which,  although  by  no  means  devoid  of  beauty, 
confirms  this  suggestion,  for  the  Madonna  and  Child 
lack  character  and  originality,  and  are  infinitely  inferior 
to  the  Dutch  painting  of  the  robes.  The  whole  compo- 
sition, indeed,  glows  and  has  depth  only  in  its  lower 
and  more  terrestrial  part,  including  in  that  term  the 
little  girl  angel  who  plays  a  tambourine  below  the 
throne. 

Bronzino  was  another  victim  to  his  pious  epoch,  though 
he  emancipated  himself  almost  as  largely  as  Moroni. 
His  Madonna  in  the  Brera  is  remarkable  for  the  secular 
modernity  of  the  Virgin's  companions.  On  her  right 
is  an  ultra-realistic  old  woman ;  on  her  left  Bernard 
Shaw  looks  down  with  his  sarcastic,  sceptical  gaze. 

Even  the  Netherlanders  who  had  had  the  fortune  to 
be  born  free  would,  after  their  wander-years  in  Italy, 
come  back  as  Italians  and  paint  in  the  grand  manner. 
Hence  the  religious  and  historic  Van  Dycks  which  com- 
pare so  poorly  with  the  portraits,  hence  Rembrandt's  fat 
vrow  as  Madonna,  hence  the  Lenten  attempts  of  Ru- 
bens to  bant. 


AN  EXCURSION  INTO  THE  GROTESQUE  :  WITH 

A  GLANCE  AT  OLD  MAPS  AND  MODERN 

FALLACIES 

Touching  is  that  quaint  theological  tree  in  the  cell  of 
sainted  Antoninus  in  San  Marco,  upon  whose  red  oval 
leaves  grow  the  biographies  of  the  brethren.  They  lived, 
they  prayed,  they  died  —  that  is  all.  One  little  leaf 
suffices  to  tell  the  tale.  This  brother  conversed  with  the 
greatest  humility,  and  that  excelled  in  silence.  A  third 
was  found  after  his  death  covered  with  a  rough  hair  shirt 
(^aspro  eilieio').  In  the  holy  shade  of  this  goodly  tree  sits 
St.  Dominic,  separating  —  as  though  symbolically  —  the 
monks  on  his  right  from  the  nuns  on  his  left. 

Naivete  can  no  further  go.  And,  indeed,  if  one  were  to 
regard  the  naivete  and  forget  the  sweet  simplicity,  there  is 
much  in  the  mediaeval  world  that  one  would  relegate  to 
the  merely  absurd.  The  masterpieces  of  Art  have  been 
sufficiently  described.  What  a  book  remains  to  be  written 
upon  its  grotesques  ! 

The  word  is  said  to  derive  from  the  arabesques  found  in 
grottoes  or  excavated  Roman  tombs  ;  those  fantastic  com- 
binations of  the  vegetable  and  animal  worlds  by  which  the 
art  of  Islam  avoided  the  representation  of  the  real.  But 
by  the  art  of  Christendom  the  grotesque  was  achieved 
with  no  such  conscientious  search  after  the  unreal.  Nor 
have  I  in  mind  its  first  fumblings,  its  crudities  of  the  cata- 
combs, its  simplicities  of  the  missal  and  the  music-book, 
its  Byzantine  paintings  with  their  wooden  figures  and  gold 
embroidery.  I  am  not  even  thinking  of  those  early 
Masters  whose  defects  of  draughtsmanship  were  balanced 

287 


288  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

by  a  delicious  primitive  poetry,  which  makes  a  Sienese 
Madonna  preferable  to  a  Raphael,  and  the  early  mosaics  of 
St.  Mark's  more  desirable  than  the  sixteenth-century  work 
that  has  replaced  them.  The  grotesque  lies  deeper  than 
unscientific  drawing  ;  it  mingles  even  with  the  work 
of  the  most  scholarly  Masters,  and  springs  from  the 
absence  of  a  sense  of  history  or  a  sense  of  humour.  That 
the  Gospel  incidents  should  be  depicted  in  Italian  land- 
scape and  with  Italian  costumes  was  perhaps  not  unnatural, 
since,  as  I  have  already  pointed  out,  every  nation  remakes 
the  Christ  in  its  own  image  —  psychologically  when  not 
physically.  Even  the  Old  Testament  was  de-Orientalised 
by  Raphael  and  his  fellow-illustrators.  Bonifacio  Vero- 
nese, for  example,  put  Italian  hills  and  music-books  into 
The  Finding  of  Moses,  and  his  Egypt  is  less  Eastern 
than  the  Venice  he  lived  in.  But  that  the  fancy-dress 
Bible  should  include  also  Doges  and  Cardinals  and  Magni- 
ficent Families,  and  that  a  Tintoretto  in  everyday  clothes 
should  look  on  at  his  own  Miracle  of  St.  Mark  or  a  Moretto 
come  to  his  own  Supper  at  Emmaus,  this  it  is  that  lifts  the 
eyebrows  of  a  modern.  One  can  permit  Dominican  friars 
to  witness  The  Incredulity  of  St.  Thomas,  or  Franciscans 
to  assist  —  as  in  Marco  Basaiti's  picture  —  at  The  Agony 
in  the  Garden.  These  holy  brethren  are  at  least  in  the 
apostolic  chain  ;  and  in  the  latter  picture,  which  is  becom- 
ingly devotional,  the  scene  is  suggested  as  a  mystic  vision 
to  justify  the  presence  of  these  anachronistic  spectators. 
But  how  is  it  possible  to  tolerate  proud  Venetian  senators 
at  The  Ascension  of  Christ,  or  to  stomach  the  Medici  at 
the  building  of  the  Tower  of  Babel  ?  It  is  true  sacred 
subjects  had  become  a  mere  background  for  lay  portraits, 
but  what  absence  of  perspective  ! 

It  would  be  an  interesting  excursion  to  trace  the  steps 
by  which  the  objective  conception  of  a  picture  —  true  to 
its  own  time  and  place  —  was  reached,  or  the  evolution  by 
which  singleness  of  subject  was  substituted  for  exuberance 


,     EXCURSION   INTO   THE  GROTESQUE       289 

of  episodes  arid  ideas,  till  at  last  Art  could  flower  in  a 
lovely  simplicity  like  that  of  Simone  Martini's  Annuncia- 
tion. You  shall  see  St.  Barbara  throned  at  the  centre  of 
her  anecdotal  biography,  or  the  Madonna  della  Misericordia 
sheltering  virtues  under  her  robe,  while  her  history  circles 
around  her.  Even  when  the  picture  itself  is  simple  and 
single,  the  predella  is  often  a  congested  commentary  upon 
the  text,  if,  indeed,  it  has  any  relevant  relation  to  the  text 
at  all.  What  can  be  more  charming  than  the  little  angels 
round  the  throne  of  the  Madonna  in  Benaglio  Francesco's 
picture  in  Verona  —  angels  with  golden  vases  of  red  and 
white  roses,  angels  playing  spinets  and  harps  and  pipes 
and  lutes  and  little  drums  and  strange  stringed  instruments 
that  have  passed  away  !  But  what  can  be  more  grotesque 
than  the  predella  of  this  delightful  picture,  the  Entomb- 
ment and  the  saints  with  the  insignia  of  their  martyrdom 
(hammer  and  tongs  and  fiery  braziers),  and  the  cock  that 
crew  and  the  kiss  of  Judas  ! 

In  a  picture  by  Lorenzo  Monaco  at  Florence  the  Virgin 
and  St.  John  raise  Christ  out  of  his  tomb,  and  above  are 
not  only  a  cross  and  the  instruments  of  martyrdom,  but  a 
bust  and  floating  hands,  while  spice  vessels  figure  below. 

To  a  modern  the  mere  treatment  of  God  the  Father 
suffices  to  create  a  category  of  the  grotesque,  even  though 
His  head  has  usually  the  venerable  appearance  of  the  aged 
Ruskin  and  He  is  kept  a  discreet  kit-kat  or  a  half-length. 
But  Fra  Bartolommeo  in  Lucca  paints  Him  at  full  length 
with  His  toes  on  a  little  angel  and  a  placard  in  His  hand 
bearing  the  letters  alpha  and  omega.  And  Lorenzo  Ve- 
neziano  parts  His  hair  neatly  in  the  middle. 

Our  catalogue  of  grotesques  is  swollen  by  the  explana- 
tory scrolls  and  inscriptions  of  the  early  pictures ;  by  the 
crude  religious  allegories,  in  which  devils  gnash  teeth 
when  Virtue  routs  Temptation ;  by  the  political  cartoons 
at  Siena  —  of  Good  and  Bad  Government  (though  these 
are  more  primitive  than  comic)  ;  by  the  literal  genealogic 


290  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

trees  —  like  that  of  Jesse  in  St.  Mark's,  or  on  the  stone 
door-posts  of  the  Baptistery  of  Parma  ;  by  the  Tree  of  the 
Cross  in  Florence,  which  shoots  out  branches  with  round 
leaves  containing  scenes  from  the  life  of  the  central  cruci- 
fied figure,  and  supports  a  pyramid  of  saints  and  celestials  ; 
by  the  devices  of  symbolism  for  representing  abstract  ideas 
or  identifying  saints.  All  haloes  are  proleptic  even  from 
childhood,  and  a  martyr  and  his  passion  can  never  be 
parted.  Those  poor  martyrs,  what  they  suffered  at  the 
hands  of  painters  without  a  gleam  of  humour ! 

'Twas  not  till  I  had  found  out  for  myself  that  the  over- 
whelming preponderance  in  Art  of  the  Crucifixion^  the 
Descent  from  the  Cross,  the  Entombment,  and  the  Pietd 
were  due  in  no  small  measure  to  the  opportunities  they 
afforded  of  painting  the  nude  figure,  that  I  discovered  why 
St.  Sebastian  was  the  most  popular  of  all  the  saints,  ex- 
ploited in  every  other  sacred  picture,  and  —  naked  and 
unashamed  —  the  almost  inseparable  attejidant  of  the  Ma- 
donna when  she  sits  in  saintly  society.  The  superiority 
of  his  martyrdom  at  the  hands  of  a  troop  of  archers  to 
other  paintable  forms  of  death  leaps  to  the  eye,  for  the 
arrows  must  be  seen  quivering  in  the  target  of  his  naked 
figure,  though  I  have  seen  this  pictorially  precious  nudity 
marred  by  such  a  plethora  of  arrows  —  as  in  the  Opera  del 
Duomo  at  Florence  —  that  the  saint  is  become  a  porcupine. 
The  grim  humour  of  the  situation  lies  in  the  fact  that  St. 
Sebastian  recovered  from  his  arrows  to  be  subsequently 
clubbed  to  death,  but  this  deutero-martyrdom  is  hushed 
up  by  the  Italian  painters.  To  add  to  St.  Sebastian's  suf- 
ferings at  their  hands,  he  has  been  made  a  plague-saint 
and  his  invaluable  nudity  haled  into  plague-pictures  and 
plague-churches,  as  by  Bartolommeo  Montagna,  who  turned 
his  arrows  into  the  metaphoric  shafts  of  the  Pest.  Not 
that  I  can  blame  the  Italian  painters.  If  I  had  ever  been 
inclined  to  underrate  the  artistic  significance  of  the  nude, 
I  should  have  been  converted  by  the  full-dressed  angelets 


EXCURSION  INTO  THE  GROTESQUE       291 

of  Borgognone's  GresH  Moriente  in  the  Pavian  Certosa. 
These  delicious  little  creatures  were  once  without  a  fig- 
leaf,  but  at  the  Father  Superior's  protest  they  were  clad 
in  belted  tunics  and  skirts,  thus  becoming  squat  little 
figures  whose  wings  burst  comically  through  their  clothes. 
What  might  have  been  a  masterpiece  is  thus  a  grotesque. 

But  if  St.  Sebastian  must  go  serapiternally  branded  with 
arrows,  like  a  British  convict,  it  is  St.  Lawrence  who  has 
the  clumsiest  symbol  to  drag  about.  He  and  his  gridiron 
are  as  inseparable  as  Don  Quixote  and  Sancho  Panza. 
Often  it  stands  on  end  and  seems  the  iron  framework  of 
a  bed.  Like  his  halo,  it  is  with  him  long  before  his  mar- 
tyrdom, as  it  accompanies  him  to  heaven.  Only  once  in 
all  Florence  do  I  remember  seeing  it  in  its  proper  place 
—  under  the  grilling  saint  —  and  then  he  is  turning  his 
other  side  to  the  flame  in  true  culinary  Christianity  ("  Jam 
versa:  assatiis  es^").  The  artist  has  spared  us  nothing 
except  the  towels  with  which  the  angels  wiped  his  face, 
and  these  may  be  seen  at  Rome  in  S.  Giovanni  in  Laterano. 
St.  Stephen  is  also  heavily  burdened  with  the  stones  that 
still  keep  falling  on  his  head.  In  Bernardo  Daddi's  fres- 
coes in  S.  Croce  they  stick  to  him  like  burrs.  St.  John, 
transformed  to  an  angel,  contemplates  his  own  (haloed) 
head  on  a  platter,  as  if  thinking  two  heads  are  better  than 
one.  Lucy  keeps  her  eyes  in  a  dish.  St.  Bartholomew 
holds  his  skin.  St.  Nicholas  —  the  patron  of  commerce 
and  the  pawnbroker  —  is  known  by  his  three  golden  balls. 
Even  families  had  their  symbols,  and  the  Colonnas,  the 
complacent  Colonnas,  had  themselves  painted  as  soaring 
heaven Wc\rds  at  the  last  trump,  each  with  a  small  column 
rising  from  his  shoulder  —  literal  pillars  of  Church  and 
State. 

These  symbols,  and  many  others  less  grotesque,  dis- 
appear either  with  the  gradual  obscuration  of  the  legends 
or  the  development  of  purer  artistic  ideas.  There  is  an- 
other kind  of  symbolism,  which  may  be  called  the  short- 


292  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

hand  of  primitive  art,  and  which  may  be  studied  in  the 
archaic  mosaics  of  St.  Mark's.  Egypt  dwindles  to  a  gate 
(as  though  it  and  not  Turkey  were  the  Porte).  Alexan- 
dria is  expressed  by  its  Pharos.  Trees  stand  for  the  Mount 
of  Olives.  There  is  much  of  the  rebus  in  these  primitive 
representations.  The  Byzantine  symbolism  of  St.  Mark's 
reaches  its  most  curious  climax  in  the  representation  of 
the  four  rivers  that  watered  the  Biblical  Garden  of  Eden 
by  classical  river  gods.  The  palm  branch  as  the  short- 
hand for  martyrdom  is  a  more  congruous  convention.  In 
the  mosaics  of  S.  Vitale  in  Ravenna  Jerusalem  and  Bethle- 
hem are  expressed  by  towers,  in  Sant'  Appolinare  Nuovo 
a  few  Roman  buildings  stand  for  Classe.  In  a  Venetian 
painting  ascribed  to  Carpaccio,  Bethlehem  is  spelt  by 
palm-trees  and  a  queer  beast  tied  to  one  of  them,  probably 
meant  for  a  camel. 

A  more  pretentious  form  of  symbolism  lies  in  the  allegory 
proper,  but  even  when  the  painting  avoids  the  grotesque, 
the  meaning  is  often  hopelessly  obscure.  Such  popular 
pictures  as  Botticelli's  Spring^  Titian's  Sacred  and  Profane 
Love  and  Paris  Bordone's  Lovers  are  still  unsolved  puzzles, 
and  perhaps  only  the  more  satisfactory  for  that.  But 
allegories  that  are  enigmatic  without  being  beautiful  are 
merely  bores.  Such  are  the  two  pictures  of  the  school  of 
Lazzaro  Sebastiani  in  Venice,  in  which  a  company  of 
figures  holding  scrolls  is  perched  in  the  boughs  of  a  tree, 
looking  at  a  distance  like  a  full  orchestra.  Both  of  these 
pictures  come  from  monasteries,  and  are  therefore  to  be 
presumed  sacred.  And  in  one  of  them  Adam  and  Eve 
are  unmistakable  under  the  tree,  with  mice  and  lizards 
gambolling  around  them,  so  that  the  tree  must  be  the  Tree 
of  Life  or  of  Knowledge  ;  but  who  is  the  youth  who  stands 
beneath  the  other  tree  in  a  strange  city  of  spires  and  towers 
and  plays  on  a  golden  'cello,  while  a  maiden  offers  him  an 
apple  ?  Such  intellectually  faded  pictures  illustrate 
clearly  the  limitations  of  painting   as  a  medium  for  in- 


EXCURSION  INTO   THE   GROTESQUE       293 

tellectual  propositions.  But  the  most  lucid  of  allegories 
or  symbolisms  has  its  own  peculiar  pitfalls.  Luca 
Mombella  introduces  into  a  Coronation  of  the  Virgin  a 
figure  of  "  Humilitas  "  who  is  magnificently  attired  and 
wears  pearls  in  her  hair,  while  Montagna's  Nestor  Victorious 
over  the  Vices  (in  the  Louvre)  proves  that  most  of  the 
Vices  are  at  least  devoted  mothers,  for  they  burden  their 
flight  by  snatching  up  their  satyr-like  .brood. 

But  these  confused  or  unintelligible  allegories  are  far 
preferable  to  symbolisms  which  are  perfectly  decipherable 
yet  perfectly  repellent,  like  Giovanni  da  Modena's  fresco 
in  S.  Petronio  which  shows  us  Christ  on  his  cross  adonis- 
ing  between  two  female  figures,  one  bestriding  a  fuU-maned 
lion  (the  Catholic  Church)  and  the  other  riding  blindfold 
on  a  goat  (Heresy).  The  lion  has  four  different  feet  — 
a  pedal  man  (St.  Matthew),  a  pedal  ox  (St.  Luke),  an 
eagle's  claw  (St.  John),  and  a  real  foot  (St.  Mark).  The 
blood  from  the  side  of  Christ  flows  into  the  chalice  held 
by  the  Church,  and  in  the  middle  of  the  stream  is  formed 
the  wafer.  The  four  ends  of  the  cross  turn  into  hands  : 
the  upper  hand  opens  with  a  key  the  gate  of  Paradise  — 
strangely  like  a  church  ;  the  lower  hand  opens  Hell  with 
a  winch  ;  the  right  hand  blesses  the  Catholic  Church,  the 
left  stabs  Heresy.  Garofalo  has  a  vast  but  still  poorer 
fresco  of  this  sort  in  Ferrara,  brought  from  a  refectory. 
Each  arm  of  the  cross  branches  into  two  hands  engaged  in 
much  the  same  occupations  as  in  the  Bolognese  fresco  save 
that  one  hand  crowns  Wisdom.  The  foot  of  the  cross 
also  turns  into  hands,  the  right  holding  a  cross  towards 
Limbo,  the  function  of  the  left  fortunately  faded.  It  is 
refreshing  to  turn  from  such  geometrical  symbolisms  to 
the  meaningless  flower-patterns  of  F.  dei  Libri,  in  which 
Crucifixions,  cherubs  reading,  satyrs  blowing  brass  instru- 
ments and  jDif^^i  playing  citharas  or  puffing  at  bagpipes 
are  interwoven  with  wriggling  snakes,  contemporary  poets 
and  ecclesiasts,  and  shaven  monks  performing  service. 


294  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

This,  of  course,  is  the  conscious  grotesque,  like  the 
borders  which  Girolamo  dei  Libri  put  round  a  serious 
picture  of  the  Magi  —  vignettes  of  other  scenes,  hands  of 
donors,  floral  patterns  and  scutcheons  with  strange  ramping 
beasts. 

To  the  deliberate  grotesque  belong,  of  course,  the  stone 
beasts  that  crouch  before  the  old  cathedrals,  the  griffin  of 
Perugia,  and  the  heraldic  beasts  of  Tura.  I  should  have 
added  Raphael's  dragons  to  the  same  category  were  it  not 
that  though  deliberately  drawn  and  though  delightfully 
grotesque,  they  are  mere  representation  of  an  object 
that  happens  to  be  grotesque  in  itself,  and  this  is  no  more 
the  artistic  grotesque  than  the  portrait  of  a  beautiful 
woman  is  necessarily  the  artistic  beautiful.  There  is  a 
deal  of  movement,  spirit,  and  invention  in  these  great 
worms  of  Raphael,  and  every  individual  St.  George,  St. 
Michael  or  St.  Margaret  is  handsomely  provided  with  an 
original  and  unique  dragon,  each  with  an  elegant  precision 
of  fearsome  form.  But  Raphael  drew  with  equal  hand 
and  the  same  loving  seriousness  a  monster  or  a  ]\Iadonna. 

Equally  conscientious  is  the  Medusa's  head  once  ascribed 
to  Da  Vinci,  with  its  carefully  combed  snaky  locks  and  its 
frogs  and  bats  and  toads.  Carpaccio's  dragon  has  far 
more  fun  in  him,  for  all  his  grisly  litter  of  skulls  and 
skeletons. 

And  I  like  Vasari's  dragon  in  his  St.  Creorge  in  Arezzo, 
with  its  spitting  double  tongue  and  its  half-eaten  man,  and 
the  gorgeous  dragon  on  a  piece  of  majolica  in  Urbino, 
into  whose  mouth  St.  George  is  driving  his  spear,  and  the 
fierce-clawed,  winged  dragon  of  the  spirited  Tintoretto  in 
the  National  Gallery,  and  above  all  the  dragon  of  Piero 
di  Cosimo's  Andromeda  in  Florence,  with  that  delightful 
curling  tail  and  that  broad  back  on  which  Perseus  can 
stand  securely  while  delivering  his  stroke. 

But  the  deliberate  grotesque  without  fun — this,  I  con- 
fess, is  a  note  in  Italian  art  which  I  find  disquieting.     For 


EXCURSION   INTO   THE  GROTESQUE       295 

into  this  polished  and  palatial  world  there  intrudes  at  times 
a  touch  of  something  sinister,  cynical  and  mocking,  as 
though  the  artist,  constricted  by  pompous  conventions, 
sought  relief  by  sticking  out  his  tongue.  Leonardo  — 
whatever  Mona  Lisa's  smile  may  mean  —  kept  his  grotes- 
querie  for  his  caricatures.  But  other  of  the  Masters  were 
less  discriminating.  This  something  of  enigmatic  and  per- 
turbing—  perhaps  it  is  only  the  acute  Renaissance  con- 
sciousness of  the  skeleton  at  the  feast  —  I  find  most  of  all 
in  Crivelli  —  Venetian  soldier,  as  he  once  signed  himself 
—  whose  rich  lacquer  work  has  had  more  attention  than 
this  diablerie  of  his.  Nobody  else  touches  the  grotesque 
so  consciously,  dares  to  give  us  such  quaint,  ill-drawn  angels 
as  those  in  his  Madonna  and  Child  in  Verona,  with  that 
bird-pecked  giardinetto  of  fruits  over  the  Virgin's  head, 
and  Christ  in  a  gold  frock  as  in  some  Byzantine  mosaic. 
The  microscopic  Crucifixion  is  perhaps  no  more  incon- 
gruous with. the  subject  of  this  picture  than  its  landscapes 
seen  through  arches,  its  chivalry  and  pomp  of  horses. 
But  one  cannot  help  feeling  that  Crivelli  had  a  grim  joy 
in  perching  that  vulture  on  the  large  gaunt  tree.  And  in 
his  Brera  Madonna,  in  which  St.  Peter  holds  two  heavy 
real  keys,  gilded  and  silvered,  he  gives  the  celestial  door- 
keeper a  crafty  ecclesiastical  look,  while  his  St.  Dominic 
looks  sawny.  Even  his  baby  Christ  is  cruelly  squeezing  a 
little  bird.  There  is  a  leer  in  the  whole  picture.  The 
accident  of  juxtaposition  has  accentuated  the  wilfulness  of 
Crivelli's  grimace,  for  in  the  Brera  there  are  two  Madonnas, 
side  by  side,  yet  at  the  extreme  poles  of  his  genius.  In 
the  Madonna  della  Candeletta  we  have  beauty  unalloyed. 
The  tiny  candle  standing  at  the  foot  of  the  Madonna's 
throne  strikes,  indeed,  a  note  of  bizarrerie,  but  it  is  beauti- 
ful bizarrerie,  and  the  Madonna,  marvellously  robed  and 
embowered  in  fruit  and  leaves,  who  is  offering  a  great 
pear  to  a  charming  child,  is  less  the  Mother  of  God  than 
a   crowned   queen   of   faery   with   an  infant  prince  in  a 


296  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

golden  robe  and  a  golden  halo,  and  less  a  queen  with  a 
prince  than  a  wonderful  decorative  pattern,  a  study  in 
gold  and  marble  and  precious  stones  and  brocaded  gowns, 
broidered,  rich-dyed,  and  fantastic  with  arabesques.  And 
beside  this  poem  hangs  the  other  Crivelli,  a  gaunt  crucifix 
with  ugly,  contorted  figures  of  the  Madonna  and  St.  John. 
And  it  is  sardonic  humour,  not  naivete^  that  has  turned 
his  St.  Sebastian  (in  the  Museo  Poldi  Pezzoli)  into  a 
porcupine. 

But  even  Giovanni  Bellini,  with  his  sense  of  restful 
perfection  and  unity  of  theme,  cannot  resist  putting  in 
microscopic  accessories  that  only  catch  the  eye  from 
anear,  as  into  his  green-throned  Madonna  and  Child  in  the 
Brera  he  introduces  horseman,  two  men  talking  by  a  tree, 
a  shepherd,  a  flock  of  sheep,  and,  strangest  of  all,  a 
shadowy  ape  crouching  on  a  tomb  which  bears  his  signa- 
ture :  "  Johannes  Bellinus."  What  is  the  significance  of 
this  shadowy  ape  ?  What  mockery  of  the  theme,  or  of 
humanity  or  of  himself  was  here  shadowed  forth  ? 

And  that  even  more  sinister  ape  in  Tura's  Virgin  sup- 
porting the  Dead  Christ  —  what  does  he  here  ?  The 
mother,  seated  on  the  tomb,  holds  the  poor  bleeding  figure 
as  though  it  were  again  her  baby.  The}'^  are  alone,  they 
and  the  thieves  and  the  cross  ;  other  men  are  moving 
away,  bearing  a  ladder.  The  picture  is  complete,  a  grim, 
solemn,  soul-moving  unity.  Why  then  did  Tura,  that 
master  of  the  conscious  grotesque,  throw  in  that  grinning 
monkey  on  that  strange  fruit-tree  ?  Was  he,  who  lived  to 
see  the  Borgian  Pope  become  the  Vicar  of  Christ,  suggest- 
ing sardonically  what  quaint  sequels  of  orgiastic  splendour, 
what  pride  and  lust  of  life,  were  to  spring  from  this  tragic 
sacrifice  ? 

A  less  perturbing  monkey  looks  on  with  other  creatures 
at  The  Creation  of  Man  in  a  Venetian  picture  now  in 
Ravenna.  A  red-girt,  blue-mantled  Deity  floats  over  a 
huge  recumbent  Adam,  whose  thigh  he  touches,  while  the 


EXCURSION   INTO   THE  GROTESQUE       297 

monkey,  eating  an  apple,  appears  to  follow  with  interest 
the  next  phase  in  evolution,  when  fruit  would  be  forbid- 
den. 

Apes  appear  again  in  Fogolino's  Adoration  of  the  Magi 
in  Vicenza  ;  squatting  below  the  castled  rocky  ways  and 
mountain-bridges,  over  which  winds  the  great  procession 
with  its  beautifully  caparisoned  horses.  These  apes,  like 
the  ape  on  the  elephant's  back  in  Raphael's  treatment  of 
the  same  theme,  might  be  merely  designed  to  suggest  the 
East,  were  it  not  for  the  disconcerting,  mysterious, 
lobster-red,  sprawling  wings?  What  further  note  of 
discord  do  we  catch  here  ? 

But  it  is  in  the  unconscious  grotesque  that  Italian  art 
is  richest.  I  have  already  shown  some  of  the  trap-doors 
that  lead  to  it,  but  to  enumerate  them  all  is  impossible. 
There  are  so  many  ways  in  which  humour  can  be  absent. 
Perhaps  one  might  generalise  as  a  source  of  the  uncon- 
scious grotesque  the  convention  dating  from  the  Bj'zan- 
tine  period  which  expresses  souls  as  small  swaddled  dolls. 
See,  for  example,  Paolo  da  Venezia's  Death  of  Mari/,  where, 
by  a  seeming  inversion  of  rSles,  Christ  flies  up  to  heaven 
with  his  mother-doll.  Perhaps,  too,  all  pictures  connected 
with  stigmata  or  vernicles  are  foredoomed  to  farce. 
There  may  be  a  noble  way  of  expressing  this  material 
transference,  but  I  have  never  seen  one.  St.  Veronica 
receiving  on  a  handkerchief  a  head  with  neatly  parted 
hair  is  prosaic  if  not  comic,  while  St.  Francis  receiving 
the  stigmata  is  simply  ludicrous. 

In  a  picture  in  the  Museum  of  Vicenza  the  kneeling 
saint  is  apparently  flying  a  kite  by  red  strings  passing 
through  holes  in  his  hands  and  feet.  The  seeming  kite 
is  really  a  small  winged  nude  flgure,  feathered  at  head 
and  feet  like  a  cock  —  the  six-winged  seraph  of  the 
Legenda  Trium  Sociorum  that  bears  the  crucified  figure, 
—  red  strings  passing  through  corresponding  holes  in  his 
head   and   feet.     The   treatment   of   the  same    scene  by 


298  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

Giotto  (in  the  Louvre)  gives  this  kite-like  appearance  to 
Jesus  himself. 

Even  more  absurdly  geometrical  is  Gentile  da  Fabriano's 
handling  of  the  theme  at  Urbino,  five  strong  red  cords 
passing  to  the  saint's  breast,  hands  and  feet  from  an 
eight-winged  figure  on  a  cross,  naked  to  its  waist.  It 
is  a  relief  to  find  these  Euclidian  lines  absent  from  the 
representation  in  the  church  of  Assisi  itself,  though  it  is 
only  in  seventeenth-century  painters  like  Sisto  Badaloc- 
chio  in  Parma  or  Rochetti  in  Faenza  that  the  stigmata  are 
transmitted  from  a  celestial  glory  or  down  a  broad  ray 
of  golden  light.  Macrino  d'Alba  at  Turin  shows  the 
saint  receiving  the  image  of  a  praying  Christ  on  a  slate 
with  a  golden  frame,  and  this  image  has  the  tonsured  head 
of  a  monk  ! 

And  what  can  be  quainter  than  the  six-winged  cherubs 
who  hover  round  the  Madonna  in  a  picture  of  the  Botti- 
celli school  at  Parma  ?  Two  of  their  red  wings  are  spread, 
the  second  pair  crossed  like  legs,  and  the  last  pair  crossed 
over  the  head,  making  a  sort  of  pointed  cap.  The  faces 
attached  to  these  wings  are  mature,  as  of  elderly,  clean- 
shaven barristers.  Another  comical  circle  of  these  ser- 
aphs, a  few  with  blue  wings,  tends  to  spoil  a  charming 
fifteenth-century  Coronation  of  the  Virgin  in  Florence. 

Martyrdoms,  too,  are  a  rich  mine  of  the  grotesque,  as 
witness  the  boiling  of  St.  John  in  the  National  Gallery, 
with  its  accessories  of  the  bellows  and  the  blowpipe,  and 
God  lifting  the  saint  bodily  up  to  heaven. 

In  the  exhilarating  frescoes  of  Montagna  in  the  church 
of  the  Eremitani  at  Padua,  St.  James's  hair,  which  is  yel- 
lowish throughout,  turns  black,  apparently,  under  the  hor- 
ror of  an  impending  mallet,  despite  that  his  halo  seems 
like  a  protective  plate  of  yellow  armour.  A  very  gay 
and  pleasing  picture  this. 

Another  source  of  the  grotesque  is  the  angelic  aero- 
plane.    In   an    Adoration  of  the  Shepherds  by  Francesco 


EXCURSION   INTO   THE   GROTESQUE       299 

Zaganelli  in  Ravenna  three  wingless  angels  employ  cher- 
ubs to  bear  them  aloft,  balancing  themselves  upon  the 
winged  heads.  One  needs  a  cherub  for  each  foot,  the 
second  places  both  feet  upon  the  same  head,  the  third, 
expertest  gymnast  of  all,  maintains  himself  upon  one  foot. 
Another  primitive  aeroplane  may  be  seen  at  Ferrara,  in 
The  Assumption  of  St.  Mary  of  Egypt.  St.  Mary  rises  on 
a  platform  supported  from  beneath  by  a  series  of  nude 
and  clothed  angels,  to  the  amaze  of  a  worthy  signor  walk- 
ing in  the  field  of  strange  palms  amid  quaint  green  build- 
ings. A  rabbit,  a  pigeon  and  a  bird  continue  absolutely 
indifferent  to  the  phenomenon. 

In  a  Carpaccio  in  the  same  town  the  cherubs  fly,  three 
heads  together,  like  a  celestial  molecule.  In  Zacchia  da 
Vezzano's  Assumption  of  the  Virgin  at  Lucca  she  rides  on 
cherubs.  There  is  an  angelic  aeroplane  in  a  painted  re- 
lief at  San  Frediano  in  Lucca,  and  in  Guido  Reni's  Im- 
maculate  Conception  at  Forli  (where  the  Virgin  stands  on 
a  leaf  on  a  cherub's  head),  and  in  Lippo  Lippi's  picture  at 
Prato  of  the  Madonna  handing  down  her  girdle  to  St. 
Thomas.  Zuccari  Taddeo  in  the  Pitti  uses  the  angelic 
aeroplane  to  carry  up  ?dary  Magdalen,  who  is  further  pro- 
vided with  a  number  of  fussy  heralds  and  avant-coureurs. 
Marco  Antonio  Franceschini  in  the  Palazzo  Durazzo-Palla- 
vicini  of  Genoa  likewise  carries  up  the  Magdalen  on  the 
backs  of  angels,  her  familiar  hair  streaming  over  her  fa- 
miliar breast.  Raphael's  Jlsion  of  Ezekiel  suggests  to 
the  profane,  God  the  Father  holding  up  His  arms  as  if  to 
start  a  flying  competition. 

But  when  every  generalisation  is  made,  it  is  the  individ- 
ual genius  for  blundering  that  opens  up  the  most  spa- 
cious vistas  of  humourless  humour.  Byzantine  art  affords, 
of  course,  the  most  naive  illustrations.  In  the  sarcophagi 
of  the  Christian  emperors  at  Ravenna  you  may  see  sheep 
eating  dates  from  tall  palms.  In  the  mosaics  of  tlie  vesti- 
bule of  St.  Mark's  you  may  see  humanity  unconcernedly 


300  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

drowning  in  the  Deluge.  Some,  it  is  true,  are  whirled 
helplessly  on  their  backs,  but  others  are  quite  apathetic 
among  the  blue,  curly  waves.  Noah  looking  out  of  the 
little  folding  doors  of  the  Ark  is  as  quaint  as  in  the  mo- 
saics of  Monreale  Cathedral  in  Sicily.  In  the  ancient 
church  of  S.  Zeno  at  Verona  there  is  an  eleventh-century 
fresco  of  the  Resurrection  of  Lazarus  in  which  the  by- 
standers hold  their  noses  —  a  poetic  touch  that  was  re- 
peated in  later  treatments  of  the  theme. 

In  the  Scuola  of  the  Confraternity  of  St.  Antony  at 
Padua,  Domenico  Campagnola  has  a  fresco,  A  Hungry 
She-Ass  adores  the  Eucharistic  Sacrament  hy  a  Miracle 
of  the  Saint,  in  order  to  convert  a  Heretic.  In  vain  are 
heaps  of  green  stuffs  and  corn  spread  and  baskets  ten- 
dered her  and  piles  of  beans  ;  the  ass,  on  her  front  knees, 
adores  the  Eucharist  on  a  priestly  table,  so  that  even  the 
baby  lad  is  wrought  up  to  adoration.  One  is  irresistibly 
reminded  of  Goethe's  landlady  at  Rome  calling  him  to  see 
her  cat  adore  God  the  Father  like  a  Christian,  when  it 
was  licking  the  beard  of  the  bust,  probably  because  of 
the  grease  that  had  sunk  into  it.  In  the  same  Scuola 
there  is  a  representation  of  the  saint's  preaching  which 
liberates  his  hearers  from  an  approaching  rain-storm. 
People  all  around  are  flying  to  get  out  of  the  rain,  not 
knowing  that  the  saint's  sermon  is  dry.  There  are 
charming  figures  of  mothers  and  children  in  the  audience 
which  atone  for  the  unconscious  humour. 

But  when  one  considers  the  libraries  written  on  Italy, 
it  is  strange  that  that  book  on  her  grotesques  should  be  as 
yet  merely  an  impious  aspiration,  and  that  nobody  has 
mocked  even  at  those  horrid  little  waxworks  that  represent 
the  plague-stricken.  Meseems  the  blessed  word  "Renais- 
sance" has  hypnotised  student  and  pleasure-pilgrim  alike, 
but  some  day  an  irreverent  refugee  from  the  Renaissance 
will  gather  up  the  threads  I  but  indicate.  In  that  delec- 
table volume  of  his  there  will  be  a  chapter  on  the  camel. 


EXCURSION   INTO   THE   GROTESQUE       301 

For  the  advent  of  the  camel  marks  the  faint  beginnings 
of  an  historic  and  geographic  sense,  and  stands  for  all  the 
fantastic  wonder-world  of  the  East.  Strange  that  the 
Crusades  or  Venice's  Eastern  Empire  should  not  have 
earlier  awakened  the  comparative  consciousness.  But  the 
East,  with  its  quaintness  and  its  barbaric  colour,  broke 
very  slowly  upon  the  culture  of  Europe  —  Victor  Hugo 
had  to  rediscover  it  even  for  modern  France.  Despite 
Altichiero's  pig-tailed  Tartars,  it  was  not  till  the  Byzan- 
tine Empire  was  destroj^ed  in  1453  and  the  Turks  were 
firmly  established  in  Europe  that  the  Christian  world 
became  really  aware  that  the  East  was  a  world  of  its  own. 
That  conquest  of  Constantinople,  from  which  the  blessed 
Renaissance  is  popularly  dated,  by  sending  so  many  Italians 
flying  home,  must  have  provided  Italy  with  Oriental 
information  as  well  as  Greek  manuscripts.  And  the 
Renaissance  (or  re-born)  camel  represents  the  quickened 
sense  of  local  colour.  At  first,  indeed,  there  is  little  im- 
provement on  the  Giotto  breed.  Apparently  none  of  the 
fugitives  rode  off  on  camels.  Such  fat  creatures  as  take 
part  in  The  Reception  of  the  Venetian  Ambassador  (a  pic- 
ture of  the  school  of  Gentile  Bellini)  were  never  seen  on 
sand  or  land.  The  Magian  kings  should  have  come  riding 
on  camels  with  swart  servitors,  but  only  a  rare  artist  like 
the  animal-lover  Gaudenzio  Ferrari  is  bold  enough  to 
attempt  this  local  truth.  And  the  result  belongs  to 
comedy.  But  a  people  without  circuses  or  zoological 
gardens,  to  which  the  camel  was  as  remote  as  the  centaur, 
was  not  keenly  aware  of  the  anatomical  details  of  this 
exotic  beast,  grotesque  enough  at  its  truest.  And  in 
the  hands  of  Gentile  Bellini  himself  the  creature  be- 
came quite  possible,  if  still  curious,  and  in  that  great 
decorative  picture  St.  Mark  preaching  in  the  Piazza  of 
Alexandria  there  is  a  real  feeling  of  the  turbaned, 
shrouded  and  minareted  East,  even  if  the  head-shawls 
of    the    women   do   appear    to    cover    top-hats    and    the 


302  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

giraffe  strolls  about  the  piazza  and  the  dromedary  is 
led  by  a  string. 

Nor  is  Eusebio  di  San  Giorgio's  camel  impossible  in  his 
Adoration  of  the  Magi  in  San  Pietro,  Perugia,  though 
immeasurably  inferior  to  his  oxen  and  his  horses.  Car- 
paccio,  too,  gets  something  of  Eastern  architecture  and 
dress,  if  more  of  Venetian,  into  his  St.  Stephen  at  Jeru- 
salem. 

But  after  all  there  is  more  fascination  in  the  primitive 
artistry  which  knew  no  differences  of  Space  or  Time,  no 
colour  but  universal  —  id  est,  Italian  —  no  place  wwlike 
home.  The  whole  temper  of  these  early  painters  seems  to 
me  summed  up  in  a  picture  in  the  Uf&zi  by  Pietro  Loren- 
zetti,  who  lived  about  1350,  Gli  Anacoreti  nella  Tehaide. 
A  green  water  borders  a  white,  curving  shore,  and  land 
and  sea  are  a  chaos  of  trees,  houses,  steeples,  people,  skiffs, 
sailing-boats,  all  of  the  same  size  and  brightness.  A  like 
absence  of  perspective — geometrical,  spiritual  or  humor- 
ous— is  seen  in  Benagilio's  fresco  in  Verona  of  Christ 
preaching  hy  the  Lake  of  Galilee,  or  Giotto's  fresco  in 
Santa  Croce  depicting  the  Apocalypse  of  St.  John.  In 
the  Lake  of  Galilee  float  two  gigantic  ducks  and  a  gondola, 
while  the  audience  includes  mediteval  falconers  and  pipers. 
Patmos  is  a  vague  turtle-shaped  island,  and  the  saint 
squats  in  the  middle  of  it,  while  above  hover  the  celestial 
figures.  Temporal  perspective  is  as  confounded  as  spatial. 
Hence  all  those  anachronisms  which  give  us  pause.  Cima- 
bue's  Madonna  consorts  with  the  Doctors  of  the  Church, 
Fra  Angelico's  with  Dominicans,  Alvise  Vivarini's  with 
Franciscans.  As  Dante  exf)lains,  the  imagination  can 
ignore  Time,  just  as  —  though  his  dubious  comparison 
weakens  his  explanation — it  can  conceive  two  obtuse 
angles  in  one  triangle.  A  truer  simile  may  perhaps  be 
drawn  from  the  Baptistery  of  Pisa,  where  the  janitor  — 
humble  link  in  the  "  nutritive  chain  "  —  chants  a  note  to 
show  the  wonderful  echo,  and  after  its  long  reverberation 


EXCURSION   INTO   THE   GROTESQUE       303 

has  been  sufficiently  demonstrated  he  sounds  the  notes  of  a 
simple  chord,  one  after  another,  so  that  the  earlier  notes 
remain  alive  and  enter  into  harmony  with  the  new  ones, 
and  one  hears  an  enchanting  quartet — yea,  even  a  quintet 
or  a  sextet.  Sometimes  he  will  set  an  even  more  complex 
chord  in  vibration,  and  all  the  air  is  full  of  delicious  har- 
mony. Even  so  the  mediseval  thinkers  conceived  of  the 
dead  and  the  quick,  the  pioneers  and  the  successors,  all  liv- 
ing in  unison,  vibrating  simultaneously  though  they  had 
started  in  sequence,  all  harmoniously  at  one  in  the  echoing 
halls  of  Fame.  And  so  things  disparate  could  be  pictured 
united  —  anachronism  was  merely  man  putting  together 
what  blind  Time  had  put  asunder.  Everything  happened 
in  the  timeless  realm  of  ideas.  And  often  —  as  we  saw  in 
Sicily  —  the  strictly  chronological  aspect  of  things  is, 
indeed,  irrelevant.  Space  and  Time  are  shifting  illusions 
that  the  spirit  disregards.  Those  who  are  in  harmony  are 
of  the  same  hour  and  of  the  same  place. 

Nor  do  I  know  where  to  look  for  a  better  map  of  the 
world  as  it  figured  itself  in  the  mediaeval  mind  —  for  your 
atlas  with  its  assumption  that  man  inhabits  mere  mounds 
of  earth  fantastically  patterned  is  as  absurd  as  your  school 
chronology  —  than  that  naive  Mappamondo  which  Pietro 
di  Puccio  frescoed  on  the  walls  of  the  Campo  Santo  of 
this  same  white  Pisa.  The  universe  is  held  in  the  literal 
hands  of  God,  whose  haloed  head  appears  dominatingly 
above,  not  without  a  suggestion  of  a  clerical  band.  In 
the  centre  of  the  cosmos  —  note  the  geocentric  glorifica- 
tion —  stands  the  earth,  mapped  out  into  continents  by  a 
couple  of  single  straight  lines.  (If  Asia  lies  north  of 
Europe  that  is  a  mere  turn  to  express  its  hyberborean 
barbarism ;  in  Era  Mauro's  map  in  the  Doge's  Palace  the 
south  has  got  to  the  top,  perhaps  because  Venice  was 
there.)  America,  of  course,  is  not.  And  yet  there  are 
compensations  even  for  the  absence  of  America.  For  this 
old  world  is  circumscribed  by  circle  on  circle.     On  the 


304  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

rim  of  the  third  are  perched  the  mere  figures  of  the  zodiac, 
but  the  spaces  between  the  remoter  extra-terrestrial  circles 
are  a-swarm  with  cherubs,  all  heads  and  wings,  and  float- 
ing robed  saints  and  endless  haloed  heads  of  the  beatified. 
The  dim  spaces  below  the  cosmos  are  solidly  garrisoned 
by  bishop  with  crozier  and  monk  with  breviary,  and  the 
predella  is  full  of  suggestions  of  beauty  and  sanctity. 
Thus  the  whole  world  lies  serenely  in  the  palms  of  God, 
and  saints  and  angels  girdle  it  with  circles  of  holiness. 

This  is,  indeed,  the  true  way  to  make  a  map  —  for  the 
actual  shape  of  the  world  is  only  one  of  the  factors  of  our 
habitation,  just  as  the  actual  features  of  a  beloved  face  do 
not  constitute  its  total  reality  for  us.  'Tis  not  eyes  or 
nose  one  sees  so  much  as  those  mental  circles  due  to 
loving  habit  in  which  the  face  swims  for  us  —  the  dear 
haloing  circles  of  tender  experience.  Rivers  and  moun- 
tains have,  indeed,  an  influence  on  life,  just  as  the  real 
eyes  and  nose,  but  the  world  we  live  in  is  always  more 
mental  than  geographical,  and  the  same  rivers  and  moun- 
tains serve  the  life  of  successive  races.  The  Red  Man's 
America  is  not  different  from  the  White  Man's  on  the 
atlas  —  save  by  the  black  dots  which  mark  the  ephemeral 
tumuli  called  cities  —  yet  the  America  of  the  Trust  and 
the  America  of  the  Tomahawk  are  two  different  contin- 
ents. The  same  thin  curve  marks  the  Thames  up  which 
the  pirate  Vikings  sailed  and  the  Thames  of  Sunday 
picnics.  More  veraciously  did  the  Arab  geographers 
conceive  of  a  country  by  its  autochthones  and  not  by  its 
configuration.  For  our  country  lives  in  us  much  more 
than  we  live  in  our  country. 

And  so,  to-day,  too,  a  true  map  would  circumscribe  our 
globe  —  not  with  the  equally  non-existent  circles  of  the 
spatial  latitude  and  longitude,  but  with  those  of  the  spirit- 
ual latitude  and  longitude  in  which  we  float —  only,  I  fear, 
our  modern  Mappamondo  would  be  girdled  with  dark  rings 
marked  "  Survival  of   the  Fittest,"    "  The   Necessity  for 


EXCURSION  INTO  THE  GROTESQUE       305 

Navies,"  "The  Need  of  Expansion,"  "The  Divinity  of  the 
DoUar " ;  soldiers  and  syndicates  would  float  around  in 
lieu  of  cherubs,  nor  would  any  divine  hands  appear  up- 
bearing us  amid  the  infinite  spaces. 

That  old  Pisan  map  leads  me  to  suspect  that  Swift  saw 
only  half  a  fact  when  he  complained  that 

"  Geographers  in  Afric  maps 
With  savage  pictures  fill  their  gaps." 

True,  many  an  old  map  might  seem  to  attest  the  truth  of 
the  accusation.  There  is  a  map  of  the  Dark  Continent  in 
the  Museum  of  Venice,  dated  1G51,  with  a  camel,  a  uni- 
corn, a  dromedary,  and  a  lion's  tail  —  all  put  in  by  hand. 
But  in  another  map  of  "  Apphrica  "  in  the  Arsenal  of  Venice 
there  are  not  only  lions  and  tigers,  but  tents  and  veiled 
figures,  and  the  turrets  and  spires  of  strange  buildings, 
and  a  gay  sprinkling  of  flags.  Surely  the  old  cartographer 
was  less  concerned  to  fill  his  gaps  than  to  express  the  poetry 
of  geography.  Maps  were,  in  truth,  of  mediocre  use  in 
ancient  times  when  the  old  Roman  roads  took  one  from 
town  to  town.  What  profited  an  aeronaut's  panorama? 
Maps  were  only  indispensable  on  the  roadless  seas.  The 
first  maps  in  tlie  modern  sense  were  thus  pragmatic,  not 
scientific,  for  it  was  from  the  mariner's  map,  or  Portolano^ 
that  rigid  cartography  arose.  But  even  these  coast  charts 
refused  to  be  prosaic.  There  is  one  in  the  Venice  Museum 
—  a  view  of  Italy  lying  sideways,  as  if  its  famous  foot  were 
asleep.  Never  have  I  seen  a  more  joyous  chart.  It  is  all 
glorious  with  the  gold  and  vermilion  of  compasses  and 
crests  and  flying  banners,  while  mountains  stand  out 
in  red  and  gold.  It  must  have  belonged  to  a  jolly  mariner. 
In  a  complete  Portolano  of  Europe  each  country  flies  its 
national  flag,  amid  a  whirl  of  crests  and  compasses.  And 
the  "  Portolano  del  1561  di  Giacomo  Maggiolo,"  which 
may  be  seen  in  the  Palazzo  Bianco  of  Genoa,  is  illuminated 
in  gold, and  blue  and  vermilion  and  green,  sprinkled  with 


306  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

compasses,  sown  with  towered  cities  crowned  by  golden 
flags  and  a-flutter  with  flying  angels  and  banners  and  the 
bellying  sails  of  carracks,  with  kings  seated  on  their  thrones 
in  the  middle  of  the  sea,  under  glorious  canopies  crowned 
with  angels,  while  over  the  whole  presides  the  Madonna 
in  her  golden  chair.  IMost  taking  of  the  monarchs  is  the 
King  of  Tartary,  wearing  a  large  moustaclie  and  surrounded 
by  golden  scimitars. 

There  were  no  gaps  to  fill  up  in  these  Portolani.  No, 
the  cynical  Swift  has  missed  the  inwardness  of  these  old 
maps,  in  which  Art  was  called  in  to  give  the  touch  of  life 
and  reality  and  to  eke  out,  not  the  barrenness  of  knowledge 
in  particular,  but  of  science  in  general.  There  is  in  the 
Ufiizi  an  old  map  of  Italy  which  fills  the  Mediterranean 
with  boats  and  compasses,  draws  the  mountains,  sketches 
the  towered  cities,  and  illumines  the  names  with  gold-leaf. 
There  is  an  old  map  of  Venice  which  perches  Father  2^  eptune 
dominatingly  in  the  middle,  and  symbolises  the  winds  by 
the  curly  locks  of  children  blowing  every  way,  and  fills 
the  canals  with  sailing-boats  and  galleys  and  gondolas. 
This  is  something  like  a  map  of  Venice.  On  another, 
which  is  more  of  a  plan  of  the  city  with  its  buildings 
named,  Venice  is  alive  with  heraldic  figures,  and  over  the 
roofs  and  domes  fly  winged  lions  and  Neptune  and  Venus 
and  angels  and  warriors,  while  a  stout-lunged  angel  blows 
two  trumpets  at  once.  And  the  spaces  of  the  sea  are  full 
of  brave  beflagged  vessels  with  swelling  sails,  and  galleys 
with  many  oars.  Surely  all  this  is  less  false  than  the  dead 
reticulation  which  expresses  Venice  in  your  modern  map. 
The  map  of  Genoa,  too,  shows  the  arms  of  the  city  float- 
ing over  a  sea  crowded  with  red  galleys  and  black  merchant 
ships  and  white  sailing-boats. 

In  these  old  maps  the  dull  spaces  of  the  world  are  lit  up 
by  fiery  stars,  trumpeting  angels,  and  allegorical  figures, 
while  another  symbolic  group,  upholding  a  titulary  tablet, 
serves,  as  it  were,  to  introduce  the  territory  to  the  spectator. 


EXCURSION  INTO   THE   GROTESQUE       307 

A  wreathed  lady  and  a  male  student  thus  combine  to 
present  Arabia.  Greece  is  introduced  and  presided  over 
by  angels.  "  Terra  nova  detecta  et  Floridce  promonto- 
rium  "  are  presented  by  a  man  holding  a  tablet,  which  records 
how  Henry  VII.  of  England  sent  out  John  Cabot  and  his 
son  Sebastian,  while  the  dry  details  are  further  vivified  by 
a  superdominant  figure  of  a  gallant  signor  in  a  feathered 
cap,  hand  on  globe  and  learned  tome  at  feet.  Asia,  as  a 
nymph  with  a  camel,  presides  over  a  map  of  her  continent, 
while  a  prodigious  Latin  title  —  "  Qua  Asipe  Regna  et 
Provincice  Hac  Tabula  Continentur  a  Propopontide  usque 
ad  Indos,"  &c.  &c.  —  records  how  its  three  makers  were 
sent  to  Russia  in  the  fifteenth  century  and  how  they  ripped 
up  {dissuerunt}  much  in  the  published  itineraries.  One 
of  the  trio,  Ambrosius  Contaremus,  remained  long  in 
Russia  to  study  the  less-known  portions  ;  another,  Josaphat 
Barbarus,  devoted  himself  for  sixteen  years  to  the  provinces 
round  the  Euxine  and  the  Mseotian  marsh.  '•'•Perlustratos 
commentariolo  exposunt.''^ 

That  old  map  of  Frau  Mauro  which  I  have  already 
mentioned  belongs  to  this  same  century,  being  dated 
1459  ;  a  circular  map  this,  in  a  gilded  frame,  with  little 
ships  floating  around  and  America  away  from  home, 
perhaps  enjoying  itself  in  Paris.  Here  our  familiar 
world  shows  upside  down,  which  is,  of  course,  as  scien- 
tific as  being  downside  up.  It  is  notable  how  Anglia 
and  Caledonia  (or  Anglia  Barbara,  as  she  is  styled  in 
Church  Latin)  are  disguised  by  this  simple  shifting  of 
the  point  of  view,  and  how  much  like  herself  Hibernia 
looks,  even  topsy-turvy.  Another  pre-American  map 
in  the  University  of  Ferrara  pictures  the  winds  per- 
sonified, blowing  from  every  quarter. 

The  Stones  of  Venice  also  assume  the  forms  of  maps, 
as  in  those  stone  reliefs  on  the  rococo  fagade  of  S.  Maria 
Zobenigo  opposite  the  Traghetto  of  the  Lily.  These 
are  town-maps  —  Candia,  its  name   upborne  by  a  flying 


308  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

boy  angel ;  Roma  with  its  twin  brethren  at  the  wolf's 
breast ;  Corfu,  characterised  by  its  castle  and  its  be- 
flagged  galleys.  The  symbolic  shorthand,  which  I  have 
already  noted  in  pictures,  spread  also  to  map-decoration 
as  in  a  map  at  the  Arsenal,  wherein  iEgyptus  is  figured 
by  an  elephant,  Libia  by  giraffes,  Judea  by  the  crescent 
and  minarets,  Germany  by  a  winged  sage,  and  "  Holy 
Russia"  by  churches. 

If  these  old  maps  erred  in  the  courses  of  rivers  and 
the  lines  of  mountains  and  in  ratios  of  space,  they  are 
not  so  misleading  as  your  modern  atlas  with  its  all  too 
accurate  earth-measurements.  For  even  your  most  primi- 
tive map,  your  mediaeval  figment,  with  Paradise  on  the 
East,  a  gigantic  Jerusalem  in  the  centre,  great  spaces  for 
Gryphons  and  Cynocephali,  Sciapodes  and  Anthropophagi, 
and  St.  Brendan's  Isles  of  the  Blest  marked  clearly  west 
of  the  Canaries,  gave  in  its  way  a  less  distort! ve  im- 
pression than  that  which  we  obtain  from  the  most  sci- 
entific chart  on  Mercator's  projection.  Your  modern 
cartographer  would  persuade  you  that  Canada  is  fifty 
times  as  large  as  Italy,  and  Canada,  contemplating  her- 
self on  a  school  globe,  already  pouts  her  breast  with 
the  illusion.  In  a  true  map,  as  distinguished  from  a 
geographical,  dead  Space  would  shrink  to  its  spiritual 
nullity,  and  for  its  contribution  to  the  human  spirit, 
for  its  amplitude  of  history  and  poesy,  Sicily  —  Italy's 
mere  foot-note  —  would  loom  larger  than  all  the  prov- 
inces of  the  Canadian  Confederation. 

And  this  misleading  potency  of  the  map  scientific 
engenders  political  as  well  as  spiritual  dangers.  Tariff 
Reform  in  Britain  rests  on  the  notion  of  exchanging 
products  preferentially  with  these  great  British  colonies 
which  bulk  on  the  map  like  continents,  but  which,  as 
yet  in  their  infancy,  only  represent  in  all  some  poor  ten 
million  souls  against  the  homeland's  forty  millions. 
Australia,  beholding  her  unified  contours  from  the  Gulf 


EXCURSION  INTO   THE  GROTESQUE      309 

of  Carpentaria  to  Bass  Strait,  persists  in  the  heroic 
delusion  that,  despite  the  torridity  and  drought  of  her 
Northern  Territory,  she  is  a  single  country,  and  that 
country  a  white  man's  —  nay,  a  Briton's  exclusively. 
For  it  is  from  the  surplus  population  of  the  little  island 
in  the  Northern  Sea  that  all  these  continents  into  which 
Britain  has  blundered  are  to  be  filled  up :  a  notion 
which  hives  in  the  same  brains  that  fever  with  alarm 
over  the  exodus  from  her  shores.  And  all  save  the 
spherical  maps  foster  an  infinity  of  fallacies  of  dimen- 
sion :  drawn  to  fill  the  like-sized  page  in  the  atlas, 
South  America  seems  a  twin  of  India ;  Ireland  and 
Madagascar  (which  contains  seven  Erins)  look  much  of  a 
muchness ;  and  Brazil,  which  is  almost  another  Europe, 
bulges  in  the  imagination  less  than  the  Balkan  Peninsula. 
What  wonder  if  statesmen  have  misguided  the  destinies 
of  nations  and  misdirected  wars  by  false  impressions 
derived  from  atlases,  with  their  deceptive  distances  and 
their  obscurations  of  the  real  character  of  territories, 
rivers,  or  harbours.  Seoul,  the  capital  of  Corea,  Lord 
Curzon  tells  us,  seems  on  the  river,  yet  it  is  three  or 
four  miles  away,  and  approachable  only  by  a  canal  at 
times  shallow.  "Get  large  maps,"  advised  the  late  Lord 
Salisbury  ;  but  I  would  say,  beware  of  maps  altogether. 
For  your  school  map  would  foist  upon  you  the  delu- 
sion that  Morocco  is  not  the  East  at  all,  but  actually 
ten  degrees  more  westerly  than  London  !  Whereas  every 
schoolboy  knows  that  it  is  in  the  middle  of  the  "Arabian 
Nights."  With  the  Orient  thus  thrown  south-west  of 
Europe,  we  are  as  befogged  by  the  atlas  of  to-day  as  by 
the  old  maps  which  put  the  Orient  on  tlie  top.  In  truth, 
the  Orient,  like  heaven,  is  not  a  place,  but  a  state  of 
mind. 

To  the  deuce  with  your  parallels  of  longitude  !     Fez  in 
the  West,  forsooth  1 


AN  EXCURSION  INTO  HEAVEN  AND  HELL : 
WITH  A  DEPRECIATION  OF  DANTE 

In  tliat  volume  on  tlie  grotesque  a  chapter  —  nay,  a 
section  —  would  deal  with  the  attempts  of  Art  to  give  form 
and  colour  to  that  after-world  "  from  whence  no  traveller 
returns."  The  grotesquerie  belongs  more  to  the  thought 
than  to  the  picture,  for  in  eschatological  aesthetics  the 
horrible  can  be  reconciled  to  the  decorative,  as  it  is  in 
Giotto's  Last  Judgment  at  Padua,  which  I  suppose  is  the 
earliest  treatment  of  the  theme  that  counts,  and  which, 
as  Giotto  and  Dante  were  in  Padua  together,  was  probably 
painted  under  the  personal  influence  of  that  great  authority 
and  explorer.  There  is  no  justification  in  Dante's  own 
work,  however,  for  the  Father's  supersession  by  the  Son, 
who  —  while  II  Padre  Eterno  is  relegated  to  the  choir-arch 
—  occupies,  as  so  often,  the  judicial  bench,  and  looms 
dominant  in  a  large  polychromatic  oval  like  an  incomplete 
spectrum,  with  saints  at  either  hand  on  golden  chairs,  and 
golden  companies  of  hovering  angels,  the  Cross  beneath 
his  feet  making  a  decorative  division  of  Heaven  from  Hell, 
and  its  arms  providing  clinging-points  for  floating  angels. 
Among  the  beatific  company  on  the  celestial  side  of  the 
Cross  are  monks  presenting  their  monastery  to  lady  saints, 
and  fussy  nude  corpses  of  all  ages  and  both  sexes  bobbing 
up  out  of  their  coffins,  some  looking  round  in  surprise, 
some  instinctively  begging  for  grace,  and  one  looking  back 
into  his  coffin,  as  into  a  cab  for  something  forgotten.  The 
Hell  is  a  chaos  of  tortures,  overdusked  by  the  Personal 
Hell,  the  fee-fi-fo-fum  ogre  (with  whom  I  came  to  grow 
very  familiar)  who  gulps  down  sinners  like  oysters.  You 
see  their  legs  protruding,  and  others  ready  for  his  maw 

310 


EXCURSION  INTO  HEAVEN  AND  HELL     311 

clutched  ill  his  greedy  hands.  Still  other  sinners  stand 
on  their  heads  or  hang  by  their  hair  or  quiver  under 
the  tortures  of  gorilla-like  devils  and  strange  serpentine 
beasts,  or  whirl  like  Paolo  and  Francesca.  And  over 
all  the  agony,  with  beautiful  serene  face,  floats  the  angel, 
clinging  to  the  Cross,  and  the  saints  sit  placid  on  their 
golden  chairs,  perhaps,  as  in  that  ecstatic  prevision  of 
Tertullian,  finding  their  bliss  enhanced  by  these  wails  of 
woe,  as  one's  enjoyment  of  one's  warm  hearth  is  spiced  by 
the  howling  of  the  winds  about. 

The  mere  ardour  of  life  was  immoral  to  the  mediceval 
mind,  as  we  may  see  from  the  celebrated  anonymous 
frescoes  of  11  Trionfo  della  Morte  in  the  Campo  Santo 
of  Pisa  —  as  if  a  cemetery  needed  any  enforcement  of 
Death's  triumph !  But  the  opportunity  is  seized  of 
besmirching  "  The  Triumph  of  Life,"  and  by  way  of  prel- 
ude to  the  tomb  and  its  terrors  a  gay  cavalcade  of  hunters 
rides  to  the  chase,  with  hound  and  horn,  winding  through 
a  lovely  landscape.  Their  horses  are  arrested  by  three 
open  coffins  on  the  roadside,  precisely  of  the  shape  of 
horse-troughs,  but  containing  corpses,  apparently  a  king's, 
a  priest's,  and  a  layman's.  The  last  is  a  mere  skeleton ; 
the  others  are  fully  robed  and  serpents  curl  spitefully 
about  them.  A  stag,  a  rabbit,  and  a  partridge  rest  serenely 
upon  a  little  plateau,  as  if  conscious  there  will  be  no 
danger  to-day  from  these  disconcerted  sportsmen.  A 
cowled  monk  holds  out  a  long  scroll  to  the  leader  of  the 
chase,  like  an  official  presenting  an  address.  Other  holy 
hermits  read  ostentatiously  beneath  the  trees  outside 
their  humble  cottage,  and  one  milks  a  quaint  goat.  As 
if  the  hermit  were  more  immune  from  death  than  the 
hunter !  Overhead  hover  fearful  fire-breathing  demons 
bearing  beautiful  women  head  downwards  to  their  doom. 
Towards  the  centre  of  the  entire  picture,  of  which  this 
forms  but  a  half,  sweeps  Death,  a  sombre  flying  figure 
with   a   great   scythe,  whom  cripples  and  the  sorrowful 


312  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

invoke  in  vain;  underneath  are  his  slain,  upon  whose 
bodies  swoop  demons  with  long  pitchforks  and  angels 
with  long  crosses,  fighting  furiously  for  the  spoil,  in  a 
game  of  pull  devil,  pull  angel.  In  one  case  the  angel  has 
gripped  tlie  arms,  the  devil  the  feet,  and  they  tug  and 
lug  with  wings  distended  to  their  fullest,  every  muscle 
a-strain ;  even  if  the  angel  succeeds,  the  racked  ghost 
will  have  known  the  Inferno.  Let  us  pray  the  poor  soul 
may  recover  breath  in  the  Hesperidean  garden,  where  sit 
the  meek  sainted  playing  on  lutes  and  lyres  or  nursing 
pet  doves  and  spaniels. 

A  companion  fresco  devotes  itself  to  The  Last  Judgment. 
To  the  sound  of  angel-trumpets  the  dead  rise  from  their 
coffins,  to  be  marched  right  or  left  by  stern  sworded  arch- 
angels, as  the  great  arbiter  —  again  in  a  surmounting 
oval  —  may  determine.  Haloed  saints  occupy  a  safe 
platform  on  high  and  watch  the  suppliant,  panic-stricken 
sinners  in  the  dock.  Hell  in  many  compartments  takes 
half  the  picture,  Satan  throned  at  centre,  a  grisly  Colossus, 
horned  and  fanged,  and  each  compartment  a  chamber  of 
horrors  unspeakable,  or  a  caldron  of  stewing  sinners, 
most  noteworthy  of  whom  are  the  three  arch-heretics  of 
the  fourteenth  century,  Mohammed,  Anti-Christ,  and 
Averroes  (the  last  grown  much  less  respectable  since 
Dante  put  him  with  Plato).  This  composition  —  the 
heretics  apart  —  is  obviously  on  the  general  lines  of 
Giotto's,  which  may  be  considered  the  archetype  of  all 
the  Judgment  pictures,  and  the  crudity  of  the  conception 
is  apparent.  It  is  a  mere  parody  of  earthly  tribunals. 
In  the  hands  of  a  Signorelli  —  as  at  Orvieto  —  the  vigour 
of  the  technique  dominates  and  sweeps  away  the  naivetS. 
It  is  the  sublimity  of  terror  — 

"Where  the  bright  Seraphim  in  burning  row 
Their  loud  uplifted  angel  trumpets  blow." 

But  this  conventional  and  crowded  rendering  has 
always  impressed  me  far  less  than  Maso  di  Bianco's  in 


EXCURSION  INTO  HEAVEN  AND  HELL     313 

S.  Croce,  where  a  solitary  soul  appears  for  judgment  in  a 
wild  gorge  under  the  throne  of  Christ,  while  two  down- 
sweeping  angels,  blowing  their  trumpets  perpendicularly, 
assist  the  awesomeness  of  the  design.  What  a  pity 
Michelangelo  did  not  handle  the  theme  with  this  massive 
simplicity,  and  give  us  one  naked,  shivering  soul  with 
the  fierce  light  of  judgment  beating  upon  him,  instead  of 
the  stereotyped  arrangement  of  the  Judge  on  high,  the 
blessed  on  his  right,  the  damned  on  his  left,  the  rising 
dead  at  his  feet,  with  Hell  opening  underneath  !  His 
colossal  fresco,  with  its  huddle  of  naked  saints  —  to  which 
the  clothes  provided  by  later  Popes  lent  the  last  touch  of 
gloom — is,  with  the  possible  exception  of  Tintoretto's 
Paradise^  the  dismallest  picture  in  the  world,  and  it  is 
even  worse  placed  than  Tintoretto's  stupendous  canvas. 

The  angel  Michael,  whose  scales  weigh  souls,  must  have 
been  hard  at  work  ere  he  could  find  enough  good  people 
to  fill  this  Paradise.  When  I  last  peeped  into  it  in  the 
Palace  of  the  Doges,  it  was  conveniently  on  the  fioor, 
having  been  removed  from  its  wall  for  repair,  and,  stand- 
ing thus  propped  up  in  the  centre  of  the  Sala  del  Maggior 
Consiglio,  it  loomed  even  more  gigantic  than  my  recollec- 
tion of  it,  filling  half  the  vast  hall  and  extending  to  the 
ceiling.  Its  precise  dimensions,  according  to  a  buzzing 
attendant,  were  twenty-two  metres  broad  by  seven  metres 
high.  Here  surely  is  the  prize  of  prizes  for  the  American 
millionaire.  The  largest  picture  in  the  world !  Think 
of  it !  But,  alas  I  a  pauperised  Government  arrogantly 
clings  to  its  treasures,  forbids  exportation.  How  smuggle 
it  out?  What  railway  carriage  could  hold  it?  How  get 
it  even  across  the  Grand  Canal  to  the  station?  What 
gondola,  what  barea,  what  vapore  even,  could  carry  it? 
Perhaps  a  bridge  of  boats  might  be  built,  as  for  the  passing 
of  an  army.     And  an  army  indeed  it  holds. 

Tintoretto's  Heaven  is,  in  fact,  congested  beyond  any 
hygienic  standard.     'Tis  a  restless,  jostling  place,  unpleas- 


314  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

ing  and  muddy  in  colour,  where  you  are  doomed  to  carry 
for  ever  the  emblems  of  your  life,  where  Moses  must 
eternally  uphold  his  Tables  of  the  Law  and  St.  George 
sport  his  armour,  and  martyrs  shiver  in  perpetual  undress. 
As  usual,  God  the  Father  is  an  absentee  Lord,  and  Christ 
and  the  Madonna  —  in  equal  authority,  not  with  the 
woman  subordinate,  as  in  a  Veronese  in  the  same  Sala  — 
dominate  the  chaos  of  figures,  flying,  whirling,  praying, 
playing,  or  reading.  To  see  this  Heaven  is  to  be  recon- 
ciled with  Earth.  Some  parts  of  it  are  already  destroyed, 
and  I  look  forward  to  the  day  when  it  shall  pass  away 
with  a  great  noise.  Smaller  but  far  more  select  is 
Tintoretto's  impressionist  Paradiso  in  the  Louvre,  with 
its  rainbow  swirls  or  celestial  vortices,  its  curving  sweeps 
of  figures  flying  on  clouds,  only  prosaic  by  its  plat- 
form where  Christ,  the  Madonna,  and  the  greater  saints 
sit  like  the  distinguished  persons  at  a  public  meeting.  His 
Purgatorio  in  Parma  is  equally  imaginative,  a  whirl  of  fig- 
ures and  wild  cliffs  and  rugged,  lurid,  serpent-haunted 
chasms,  down  which  angels  plunge  to  bring  up  souls  to 
the  Madonna,  who  sits  alone  in  her  gloriole.  Bartolommeo 
Spranger's  Heaven — which  maybe  seen  in  Turin  —  is  a 
place  where  saintly  companies  link  hands  as  in  a  child's 
game,  while  grimacing  demons  or  snakes  tear  at  sinners. 
Palma  Giovane  tried  to  cover  the  entrance  wall  of  the 
Sala  dello  Scrutinio  of  the  Doge's  Palace  with  an  emula- 
tion of  Tintoretto,  but  the  main  renown  of  his  Last  Judg- 
ment seems  to  rest  on  his  humorous  idea  of  putting  his 
wife  both  into  Heaven  and  Hell.  The  use  of  Hell  to  pay 
off  private  scores  is  not  unique  with  Palma,  and  of  course 
everybody  can  plead  the  precedent  of  Dante. 

In  another  Venetian  Paradise  —  that  of  Jacobello  del 
Flore  —  the  symmetrical  groups  of  haloed  saints  in  blue 
and  red  and  gold  recall  exactly  the  groups  in  the  La  Scala 
ballet.  The  Paradise  in  Botticelli's  Assumption  of  the 
Virgin  in  tlie  National  Gallery  is  also  somewhat  geometric, 


EXCURSION  INTO  HEAVEN  AND   HELL     315 

though  the  empty  liliecl  court  below  gives  beautiful  re- 
lief. Era  Bartolommeo's  large  faded  fresco  of  The  Last 
Judgment^  in  Florence,  with  its  sworded  archangel  to  greet 
the  poor  souls  as  they  rise  from  their  graves,  is  inspired 
by  the  Pisan  fresco,  and  is  less  interesting  than  that  of 
Fra  Angelico,  his  fellow  Dominican  at  San  Marco,  in 
whom  we  breathe  a  serener,  clearer  air,  though  his  sweet- 
ness and  finish  accentuate  again  the  intellectual  naivete. 
His  series  of  little  panels  in  the  Accademia  of  Florence 
has  a  quaint  originality,  the  Judge  sitting  over  a  mystic 
red  and  green  wheel,  with  the  blessed  on  either  hand. 
Angels  welcome  newcomers  or  lament  over  the  rejected, 
while  demons  poke  spears  into  the  damned.  More  con- 
ventional in  composition  is  his  large  easel-picture  in  the 
same  room  —  a  miracle  of  detailed  loveliness,  except  for 
the  Hell,  which  is  botched,  as  tliough  unsuited  to  his 
artistic  temperament.  Indeed  we  know  he  made  his  devil 
hideous  out  of  sheer  dislike  of  the  theme.  The  sheep 
are  divided  from  the  goats  by  a  curious  row  of  open 
graves  resembling  sky-lights.  The  Judge  is  superdomi- 
nant,  angels  and  babes  hovering  round  him,  the  trumpeting 
angels  at  his  feet.  In  the  Paradise  of  flowers  walk  the 
saints  in  couples  and  companies  ;  the  sinners  —  in  crowns, 
mitres,  or  mere  caps  —  are  driven  Hell  ward  at  the  points 
of  a  pitchfork  into  their  respective  circles,  where  some  are 
eaten  of  the  horrible  horned  Satan,  some  are  eating  one 
another,  and  others  are  gnawing  their  own  bloody  hands. 
There  are  sinners  seething  in  pots,  sinners  starving  at  a 
laden  table,  sinners  hung  up,  sinners  holding  their  own 
heads  in  their  hands.  Demons  like  brown  bears  gnash 
white  teeth,  and  in  the  north-north-east  corner  of  Hell  a 
capacious  big-toothed  gullet  —  horrible  in  its  suggestion 
of  more  behind  —  is  gulping  down  two  red-headed 
wretches.  In  his  Christ  in  Hades  the  gentle  painter, 
following  an  apocryphal  gospel,  incarnates  Hell  in  a  demon 
crushed  beneath  its  door. 


316  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

In  the  Strozzi  Chapel  of  S.  Maria  Novella  the  theme  is 
repeated  by  the  brothers  Orcagna.  Andrea  took  Paradise 
and  suffused  it  with  tender  beauty,  fitting  it  with  row 
upon  row  of  seraphim  and  saintly  figures,  whose  serried 
symmetrical  haloes  suggest,  however,  a  marshalling  of 
saints  for  inspection,  while  Bernardo  made  of  Hell  a  chart 
of  ugliness  —  a  compartmental  chaos  of  strange  fading 
horrors  —  fading  though  the  Heaven  has  lasted.  But  it 
is  not  easy  to  get  decorative  beauty  into  the  Inferno,  espe- 
cially when  broken  up  into  parishes  of  pain  and  not  part 
of  a  complete  Last  Judgment  such  as  that  by  Andrea 
single-handed  in  the  same  Chapel.  In  this  last,  angels 
carrying  the  cross  and  the  thorns  make  a  variant  in  the 
composition.  In  the  Spanish  Chapel  of  the  same  church 
The  Way  to  Paradise  is  treated  as  of  more  concern  to 
mortals  than  the  nature  of  the  goal,  of  which  we  get  the 
merest  peep ;  and  perhaps  the  artist's  own  concern  was 
Beauty,  for  the  central  pattern  of  the  picture  is  woven  by 
a  procession  on  richly  caparisoned  horses  winding  round 
and  round.  Tj-anquilly  beautiful  are  the  figures  at  the 
Passion,  even  apart  from  the  tender  figure  of  Christ, 
whose  halo  hides  the  form  of  the  decorative  polished  cross 
he  bears. 

The  Paradise  is,  however,  a  Dominican  Paradise,  for 
this  noble  fresco  on  examination  turns  out  to  be  a  compli- 
cated allegory  in  glorification  of  the  order,  even  including 
the  pictorial  pun  or  rebus  of  black-and-white  dogs  (^domini 
canes')^  guarding  the  faithful  sheep  and  worrying  the 
heretical  wolves.  The  Dominican  Heaven  has  always  a 
marked  preference  for  Dominican  dogma,  as  the  Dominican 
Hell  is  particularly  hospitable  to  rival  forms  of  teaching. 
Incidentally  this  great  anonymous  painting  is  a  social 
Mappamondo  of  the  mediaeval,  including  every  type  in 
Church  and  State  from  Pope  to  pauper ;  the  vanities  and 
pomps,  the  penances  and  renunciations.  A  lovely  peace 
broods  over  this  picture,  as  over  all  the   Chapel.     Hell 


EXCURSION   INTO  HEAVEN  AND  HELL     317 

does  not  disturb  its  restful  walls,  save  as  the  niilJ  Limbo 
to  which  Christ  descends  to  redeem  Adam,  Noah,  and 
other  figures,  proleptically  haloed.  He  hovers  majes- 
tically over  the  vague  scene,  carrying  a  red-cross  flag  over 
his  left  shoulder.  It  is  only  the  demons  who  give  gro- 
tesquerie  to  the  picture,  but  they  are  unsurpassable.  One 
of  these  baffled  imps  falls  prostrate  in  the  void,  another  is 
tearing  his  goatee  beard,  a  third  stands  scowling,  with 
folded  wings,  the  hair  of  a  fourth  stands  on  end,  a  bristle 
of  wires.  This  last  demon  is  livid  in  hue ;  his  fellows 
are  more  or  less  fiery. 

Bronzino  has  dealt  less  happily,  if  less  grotesquely, 
with  the  same  theme,  for  to  his  later  vision  it  was  a  good 
opportunity  for  studying  the  nude  and  the  half-nude. 
But  to  follow  out  the  theme  of  Christ  iti  Hades  would 
carry  me  too  far.  I  must,  however,  refer  to  the  touching 
conception  of  Christ  rushing  to  the  rescue  :  as  in  the 
picture  by  Andrea  Previtali  in  which  Christ  is  seen  in  a 
whirl  of  drapery  with  a  streaming  flag,  pulling  up  an  old 
woman  and  a  girl.  A  large  cross  occupies  the  centre  of 
this  Limbo,  to  which  cling  or  pray  rescued  nude  figures, 
while  St.  John  stands  by  witli  a  smaller  cross. 

The  after-world  was  rendered  not  only  in  painting,  but 
in  other  art-media.  In  his  famous  pulpit  in  the  Baptistery 
of  Pisa  Niccolo  Pisano  carved  it  in  relief,  imaginatively 
rendering  the  faces  of  the  damned  almost  animal  with  sin. 
Byzantine  art  treated  it  in  mosaic  and  enamel,  in  stone 
and  bronze,  while  on  the  rich-jewelled  Pala  d'Oro  of 
St.  Mark's,  Christ  in  Hades  has  called  forth  the  craft  of 
the  goldsmith.  An  exhaustive  study  of  eschatological 
aesthetics  would  include  also  the  innumerable  apotheoses 
and  receptions  in  Heaven,  would  involve  a  comparison 
with  Teutonic  and  other  pictorial  conceptions,  and  would 
range  from  the  pious  sincerities  of  the  primitives  to  the 
decorative  compositions  of  the  decadents. 

I  do  not  know  if  any  scholar  has  yet  thus  treated  the 


318  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

genesis  and  evolution  of  these  pictorial  images.  They  cer- 
tainly did  not  derive  from  Dante,  for  Dante's  poem  itself 
contains  an  allusion  to  a  Florentine  calamity,  which  we 
know  to  have  been  the  collapse  in  ISO-t  of  a  wooden  bridge 
over  the  Arno,  holding  spectators  of  a  popular  represen- 
tation of  the  horrors  of  the  Inferno. 

Moreover  —  apart  from  the  demons  and  chimeeras  dire 
on  the  old  Etruscan  tombs  —  fumblings  at  the  theme  exist 
in  art  prior  to  Dante,  as,  for  instance,  those  rude  bronze 
reliefs  in  the  Byzantine  manner  on  the  doors  of  S.  Zeno 
in  Verona,  which  mark,  as  it  were,  the  Bronze  Age  of  the 
concept.  These,  I  was  assured,  were  ninth-century,  but 
even  dating  them  at  the  eleventh  or  twelfth  —  and  the 
church  contains  frescoes  as  early  —  they  were  in  time  for 
Dante  to  have  seen  them  when  enjoying  Can  Grande's 
hospitality  in  Verona.  His  denunciation  of  Alberto  della 
Scala  for  appointing  his  bastard  as  abbot  of  the  monastery 
shows  his  interest  in  S.  Zeno.  In  these  rude  bronzes  Dante 
beheld  the  bare  elements  of  that  Hell  which  he  furnished 
so  handsomely.  Here  is  already  the  giant  fee-fi-fo-fum 
figure  holding  —  O  primeval  irony! — a  quaking  monk. 
Here  is  the  sinner  upside  down  whose  legs  are  disappear- 
ing within  a  caldron.  Here  also,  in  another  bronze  relief, 
is  Christ  in  Limbo,  haling  figures  out.  Christ's  halo  is 
novel,  consisting  of  three  tufts,  one  sticking  out  on  either 
side  of  his  head,  the  other  on  top.  It  may  interest  the 
decadent  to  learn  that  there  is  also  a  relief  of  Salome 
dancing,  in  which  she  anticipates  all  the  modern  contor- 
tionists. 

To  pass  back  from  the  Bronze  Age  of  the  Last  Judgment 
to  the  Stone  Age,  that  fine  old  Lombardic  cathedral  of 
Ferrara,  whose  lateral  facades  date  from  1135,  shows  in  a 
lunette  over  one  of  them  a  stone  relief  of  The  Day  of 
Judgment.  Flanked  by  saints,  "  God's  in  his  Heaven," 
holding  the  saved  souls  in  his  lap  in  a  sort  of  sheet,  while 
the  devil  in  his  Hell  pokes  up  his  busy  fire  and  an  acolyte 


EXCURSION  INTO  HEAVEN  AND   HELL     319 

shoves  a  sinner  down  a  dragon's  mouth.  The  Baptistery 
of  Farma,  a  structure  less  ancient,  but  still  antecedent  to 
Dante,  shows  on  its  left  portal  three  dead  men  coming  out 
of  their  tombs,  to  be  received  by  the  angels  or  the  execu- 
tioner, according  to  the  dictum  of  the  Judge  on  high,  who 
is  nursing  a  saved  soul.  The  guilty  lean  anxiously  out  of 
curious  stone  buildings,  apparently  awaiting  their  turn  to 
be  decapitated. 

With  such  compositions  existing  in  Italy,  it  seems  super- 
erogatory of  M.  Didron  to  have  counted  more  than  fifty 
French  illustrations  of  the  "Divine  Comedy,"  before 
Dante,  painted  on  church  windows  or  sculptured  on  church 
portals,  or  for  M.  Lafitte  to  seek  for  Dante's  inspiration 
in  the  western  portal  of  Notre-Dame,  which  he  must  have 
seen  during  his  stay  in  Paris. 

Giotto,  then,  did  not  altogether  originate  his  conception 
of  the  Judgment  scene.  Indeed,  already  in  the  alleged 
discourse  of  Josephus  to  the  Greeks  concerning  Hades,  we 
have  a  word-picture  of  the  Hebrew  Day  of  Judgment  in 
which  the  souls  of  the  just  are  marshalled  to  the  right  and 
the  souls  of  the  sinners  to  the  left. 

Dante  may  equally  be  exonerated  from  the  crime  of 
having  originated  these  grotesque  notions  of  the  after- 
world,  if  he  cannot  be  exonerated  from  the  crime  of  cor- 
roborating them.  These  infantile  images  were  made  in 
the  brains  of  fasting  monks  and  terror-stricken  sinners  — 
for  brains  make  day-dreams  as  well  as  nightmares  —  on  a 
confused  basis  of  the  classic  Hades  and  Tartarus  and 
Elysium  and  the  Egyptian  after-world  and  the  Hebrew 
Gehennah,  supplemented  by  misapplied  texts  and  misun- 
derstood metaphors.  They  drew  their  appeal  from  that 
conflict  'twixt  good  and  evil  which  every  man  felt  raging 
in  his  own  soul,  and  which  made  plausible  the  externalisa- 
tion  of  these  forces  as  angels  and  demons  fighting  for  its 
possession. 

But   though   the   first    sketch   of    the    Christian    Hell 


320  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

appears  in  literature  as  early  as  the  apocryphal  "  Acts  of 
St.  Thomas,"  Dante  may  be  said  to  have  systematised  these 
chaotic  conceptions,  drawn  the  chart  of  the  Hereafter,  and 
determined  the  scientific  frontiers  between  Hell  and 
Limbo,  Purgatory  and  Paradise.  His  are  the  nine  con- 
centric circles  of  the  Inferno,  though  Acheron  and  Minos, 
Charon  and  Cerberus,  are  borrowed  from  his  guide  and 
master;  he  is  the  sole  discoverer  and  surveyor  of  the 
island-mountain  of  Purgatory,  so  precisely  antipodal  to 
Jerusalem,  with  its  seven  parishes  corresponding  to  the 
seven  deadly  sins ;  his  are  the  nine  Heavens,  ascending 
to  the  Beatific  Vision,  that  is  circumscribed  by  the  thrice 
tliree  orders  of  the  angelic  hierarchies.  Nevertheless, 
marvellous  as  is  the  sustained  imaginativeness  of  the 
achievement,  his  contribution  to  the  stock  of  eschatologi- 
cal  ideas  is  comparatively  small.  The  vulgar  imagination 
is  quite  capable  of  bodying  forth  these  grimacing,  horned 
demons,  these  imps  with  prongs  and  lashes,  those  swoop- 
ing fiends,  that  heavy  head-gear  —  not  unlike  the  English 
high  hat  in  August — those  fiery  floods,  those  gibbering, 
wailing  ghosts,  those  wretches  immersed  in  ordure,  those 
ghastly  sinners  munching  each  other,  those  disgustful 
stenches  and  itchings.  Dante  would  not  be  remembered 
for  such  nurser}'  horrors.  Happily,  he  enriched  the  theme 
with  finer  imaginings.  They  meet  us  at  the  very  thresh- 
old of  the  dolorous  city  in  those  neutral  souls  good  enough 
neither  for  Heaven  nor  Hell ;  like  the  abdicating  Pope 
Celestine  V.,  neither  rebels  against  God  nor  true  to  Him. 
Yet  Dante  almost  spoilt  liis  own  conception  by  adding 
the  material  pains  inflicted  by  wasps  and  hornets  to  their 
eternal  nullity.  Kipling,  in  his  probabl}^  unconscious  ap- 
proximation to  the  idea  in  "  Tomlinson,"  had  a  sounder 
instinct,  though  perhaps  Ibsen's  idea  of  returning  Peer 
Gynt  to  the  Button-Moulder  hits  the  truer  penology. 
Dante's  touch  is  more  satisfying  when  he  pictures  the 
doom  of  those  who  were  sad  in  sunny  air,  and  must  now 


EXCURSION   INTO  HEAVEN  AND  HELL     321 

continue  sad  in  the  more  appropriate  surroundings  of 
slime.  Yet  there  is  here  a  touch  of  the  Gilbertiau  gro- 
tesque;  a  foreshadowing  of  the  Mikado,  whose  "object 
all  sublime"  was  "to  make  the  punishment  fit  the  crime." 
This  suggestion  is  even  stronger  in  the  twenty-seventh 
canto,  where  Mohammed  and  the  arch-heretics  who  pro- 
voked schisms  are  ripped  and  cleft  from  chin  to  forelock. 
Savagery,  too,  is  met  by  savage  punishment,  as  in  the 
Ugolino  episode. 

There  are  a  few  inventions,  indeed,  beyond  the  vulgar  im- 
agination :  the  six-footed  serpent  that  transmutes  the  sin- 
ner to  its  own  form,  a  passage  palpitating  with  j3^schylean 
genius;  the  monstrous-paunched  coiner,  consumed  with 
a  terrible  hate  ;  the  shore  "  turreted  with  giants ;  "  the 
tears  that  cannot  be  shed.  Nor  could  the  vulgar — pre- 
occupied with  lire  —  have  conceived  a  Hell  of  ice,  though 
Dante's  Arctic  circle  is  bettered  in  the  Gospel  of  Barnabas 
preserved  in  an  Italian  MS.,  which  compounds  a  Hell  of 
fire  and  ice  united  by  the  Justice  of  God,  "  so  that  neither 
tempers  the  other,  but  each  gives  its  separate  torment  to 
the  infidel,"  and  in  Vondel's  "  Lucifer "  the  archfiend  is 

condemned  to 

"  The  eternal  fire 
Unquenchable,  with  chilling  frosts  commingled." 

But  neither  the  Dutch  poet  nor  his  contemporary,  Milton, 
condescended  to  the  fee-fi-fo-fum  infantility  of  Dante's 
three-headed  King  of  Hell,  that  fantastic  fiend  who  holds 
in  each  of  his  mouths  one  of  the  three  archetypal  traitors, 
Judas,  Brutus,  and  Cassius.  And  that  Dante's  "  Judg- 
ment "  was  not  considered  "  The  Last "  is  shown  by  the 
popularity  of  Brutus  —  as  a  tyrannicide  —  in  the  Florence 
of  the  Medici.  The  beauty  of  the  verse  and  the  imagina- 
tive intensity  alone  render  Dante's  "  Inferno  "  bearable. 
Translated  into  the  images  of  Signorelli  or  Michelangelo 
—  and  these  more  truly  than  Botticelli  were  Dante's  illus- 
trators— the  grossness  of  his  "  Inferno"  leaps  to  the  eye, 


322  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

while  his  finer  imaginings  are  not  capable  of  interpreta- 
tion by  brush  or  pencil. 

The  paradox  of  the  "  Divina  Commedia,"  indeed,  is  that 
it  lives  less  by  its  supernatural  visionings,  sombre  and 
splendid  as  these  occasionally  are,  than  by  its  passages  of 
the  earth,  earthy,  when  the  world  the  poet  has  left  behind 
breaks  in  upon  the  starless  gloom  of  Hell  or  upon  the  too 
ardent  radiancy  of  Paradise.  Nor  need  I  prove  my  case 
by  the  familiar  episodes  of  Paolo  and  Francesca,  and  of 
Ugolino,  though  Dante's  fame  rests  so  largely  upon  them. 
Never  was  poem  more  terrestrial,  more  surcharged  with 
the  beauty  and  grossness  of  earth-life.  The  delicious 
touches  of  natural  beauty,  the  splendid  descriptions  of 
sunrise  and  moonlight,  the  keen  observation  of  animal  and 
insect  life,  of  starlings  and  doves,  of  storks  and  frogs,  of 
falcons  and  goshawks,  the  pictures  of  the  jousts  at  Arezzo, 
or  of  the  busy  arsenal  of  Venice,  the  homely  similes  paint- 
ing indirectly  the  labours  of  ploughmen  and  shepherds, 
warriors  and  sailors,  even  the  demeanour  of  dicers  —  tliis 
last  Dante's  sole  approach  to  humour  —  it  is  by  these  that 
Dante  will  live  when  his  Heaven  and  Hell  are  rolled  up 
like  a  scroll.  The  sound  of  the  vesper  bell  that  touches 
the  earthly  pilgrim  moves  us  more  than  all  the  celestial 
music  of  the  Purgatory  ;  the  vision  of  beatific  goodness, 
beside  the  lovely  picture  of  the  ancient  virtue  of  Florence 
in  the  homely  ages,  is  an  airy  nothing  —  one  is  more  inter- 
ested even  to  hear  the  ladies  of  the  day  rebuked  for  their 
low-necked  dresses.  The  dazzling  circles  of  Paradise 
leave  us  lethargic  compared  with  the  irrelevant  intrusion 
therein  of  the  lark's  rapture  of  song  or  the  earthly  pain  of 
exile. 

"  Til  proverai  s\,  come  sa  di  sale 
Lo  pane  altrui,  e  com'e  duro  calle 
Lo  scendere  e'l  salir  per  I'altrui  scale." 

To  prov^e  how  salt  is  others'  bread,  how  hard  the  passage 
up    and    down    others'    stairs  !     How    impotent    all    the 


EXCURSION   INTO   HEAVEN  AND   HELL     323 

laboured  strivings  to  shadow  forth  the  vision  celestial 
compared  with  this  touch  of  the  terrestrial  concrete  !  In 
truth  Dante  did  not  go  "out  of  his  senses,"  even  in  his 
most  transcendental  moments  of  insj^iration.  His  five 
senses  were  all  he  had  wherewith  to  obtain  the  raw  ma- 
terial of  his  imaginings,  and  out  of  his  sensations  of  touch 
and  sight,  of  smell  and  taste  and  hearing,  he  wove  both 
his  Hell  and  his  Heaven.  The  stored  repugnances  of  man- 
kind, the  shudders  and  horrors  at  beasts  and  serpents,  at 
bites  and  wounds  and  loathsome  diseases,  the  dread  of  fire  — 
he  himself  was  condemned  to  be  burnt  alive  —  the  chill 
of  ice,  the  nausea  of  stinks  and  dizzying  motions  —  these 
are  factors  of  his  Hell,  as  the  odour  of  flowers  and  incense, 
the  shimmer  of  jewels,  the  sound  of  music,  and  the  pains  and 
pleasures  of  anticipation  are  the  factors  of  his  Purgatory. 
As  for  his  Paradise,  it  is  merely  the  sublimation  of  the 
philosophic  Elysium  Aristotle  and  Cicero  had  conceived 
before  Christianity  ;  his  very  ecstasy  of  Light  is  antici- 
pated by  Seneca. 

Restlessness  is  a  recurring  image  of  doom  with  Dante 
—  and  perhaps  his  own  wander-years  of  exile  lent  vivid- 
ness to  the  onward  drifting  of  the  neutral  spirits,  the 
unrepose  of  the  learned  sinners,  the  eternal  whirl  of  Paolo 
and  Francesca.  Yet  there  are  moments  in  which  Dante 
rises  beyond  his  gross  scale  of  punishments  to  a  more 
spiritual  plane. 

"  Thou  art  more  punished  in  that  this  thy  pride 
Lives  yet  unquenched  ;  no  torrent,  save  thy  rage, 
Were  to  thy  fiery  pain  proportioned  full." 

In  addressing  this  observation  to  Capaneus,  Virgil,  says 
Dante,  spoke  in  a  higher-raised  accent  than  ever  before. 
In  a  less  literal  sense,  it  is  indeed  a  higher  accent  :  it  is 
even  the  note  of  modern  thinking,  from  Spinoza  onwards. 
The  wages  of  sin  is  —  sin  !  It  is  probably  even  the  note 
of  an  earlier  and  still  more  misunderstood  Master.  But 
this  note  is  only  heard  once  and  faintly.     The  wages  of 


324  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

sin  is  physical  torture.  But  surely  such  a  Hell  is  unjustly 
balanced  by  such  a  Heaven  —  all  Platonic  intellection, 
Plotinian  ecstasy,  and  ethereal  Light.  If  the  wages  of  sin 
is  physical  torture,  then  the  wages  of  virtue  should  be 
physical  rapture.  Dante's  Hell  requires  Mohammed's 
Heaven,  just  as  Christ's  Heaven  requires  an  immaterial 
Hell.  For  if  the  Kingdom  of  God  is  within  you,  the 
Kingdom  of  the  Devil  cannot  be  without.  This  thought 
broke  dimly  on  Milton  when,  despite  his  material  Hell,  he 
wrote  of  Satan  : 

"  But  the  hot  Hell  that  always  in  him  burns, 
Though  iu  mid-heaven.     .     .     ." 

Dante's  Purgatory  possesses,  indeed,  some  of  the 
material  attractions  a  logical  Heaven  needs  :  it  has  all 
the  makings  of  an  Earthly  Paradise  not  inferior  to  Addi- 
son's in  his  "Vision  of  Mirza."  There  are  even  great  set 
pieces  of  painting,  and  much  that  might  well  tempt  the 
soul  to  linger  on  its  upward  way. 

The  soul  of  the  present  critic  is  also  tempted  to  seek 
superiority  by  preferring  the  Paradise  to  the  Inferno. 
Alas!  a  law  of  psychology  has  ordained  that  pleasures 
shall  be  less  exciting  than  tortures,  and  hence  the  Purga- 
tory is  far  duller  than  the  Inferno,  while  the  Paradise  is 
hopelessly  swamped  in  sweetness  and  light.  The  splendid 
vision  of  the  snow-white  Rose  —  wonderful  as  poetry  — 
retains  little  spiritual  value  under  analysis,  though  the 
majestic  passion  of  the  close  of  the  great  poem  almost  car- 
ries up  the  spirit  with  closed  eyes  to  this  dazzling  infinitude 
of  Light  and  Love. 

Read  as  a  poem  of  earth,  the  "  Divine  "  Comedy  has  for 
us  a  value  quite  other  than  Dante  —  iu  his  political  and 
prophetic  passion  —  designed.  What  we  see  in  it  is  the 
complete  Mappamondo  of  the  mediaeval,  a  complete  vision 
of  the  world,  with  its  ethics,  its  philosophy  and  its  science, 
as  it  reflected  itself  in  the  shining  if  storm-tossed  soul  of 


EXCURSION  INTO  HEAVEN  AND   HELL     325 

the  poet,  whose  epic  was  alike  the  climax  and  the  conclu- 
sion of  the  Middle  Ages.  No  wonder  the  Italian  quotes 
it  with  the  finality  of  a  Gospel  text.  For  this  epic  is  less 
of  a  people  than  of  humanity.  Though  the  Florentine 
background  is  of  the  pettiest  —  including  even  Dante's 
apologia  for  breaking  a  font  in  the  church  of  St.  John  — 
it  is  really  world-history  with  which  the  poem  is  concerned ; 
not  world-history  as  the  modern  conceives  it,  for  Dante's 
Mappamondo  held  neither  America  nor  China,  neither 
Russia  nor  Japan,  but  that  selected  conceptual  world  — 
that  autocosm  —  in  which  the  cultured  of  his  day  lived 
and  had  their  being  :  a  world  in  which  classic  and  chival- 
ric  legend  had  their  equal  part  —  as  they  have  in  the 
poetry  of  Milton  —  so  that  the  very  "  Paradiso "  could 
open  with  an  invocation  to  Apollo !  And  this  world-his- 
tory is  unified  by  being  strung  together  on  a  moral  plan, 
precisely  as  in  the  Hebrew  Bible,  Judas  and  Brutus  find- 
ing themselves  equally  in  Lucifer's  avenging  fangs.  The 
flames  of  righteous  indignation  redeem  the  crude  brim- 
stone, and  if  we  bleed  for  the  sinners,  the  sins  under  chas- 
tisement are  mainly  those  we  would  wish  purged  from  the 
universe  in  the  white  flame  of  righteousness.  Indeed,  this 
great  sensuous,  sinful  Tuscan,  who  went  unscathed  through 
the  dolorous  city,  is  a  soul  on  fire.  He  is  taken  up  to 
Heaven,  like  Elijah,  but  in  the  fiery  chariot  of  his  own 
ardour.  His  passion  is  the  stars,  visible  symbol  of  beauty 
and  infinity.  Each  of  his  three  great  sections  ends  with 
the  very  words.  "  The  stars  "  shine  again  in  that  noble 
letter  refusing  the  Republic's  terms  of  pardon.  "  What !  " 
cries  the  exile,  "  shall  I  not  everywhere  enjoy  the  sight  of 
the  sun  and  the  stars  ?  "  "The  love  that  moves  the  sun 
and  the  other  stars  "  is,  indeed,  the  great  doctrine  of  the 
poem  —  its  literal  last  word.  How  this  love,  "this  good- 
ness celestial,  whose  signature  is  writ  large  on  the  uni- 
verse," is  to  be  reconciled  with  the  spirit  that  moves  the 
flame  and  the  other  dooms,  he  does  not  explain.     Though 


326  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

ever  and  anon  his  own  tears  of  pity  flow,  the  doctrine  of 
eternal  hopeless  torture  does  not  appall  him ;  not  even 
though,  at  the  Day  of  Judgment,  worse  is  in  store,  for  the 
sufferers  shall  by  then  liave  subtilised  their  practised  nerves 
for  the  final  damnation.  It  does  not  disconcert  him  — 
any  more  than  it  disconcerts  his  great  admirer,  Michelan- 
gelo —  that  unbaptised  infants  and  heathens  whose  only 
crime  was  chronological  should  sigh  in  Limbo,  and  that 
Adam  and  Noah,  Abraham  and  Moses  themselves,  should 
need  for  their  salvation  the  special  descent  of  Christ. 
For  all  his  sublimity,  his  passionate  metaphysic  insight 
into  the  Godhead,  he  falls  below  the  homely  Rabbis  of  the 
Talmud,  who  taught  eight  or  ten  centuries  earlier,  "  The 
righteous  of  all  nations  have  a  share  in  the  World-to-Come." 
Yet  there  are  broken  lights  of  this  truth  here  and  there. 

"  But  lo  !  of  those 
Who  call,  'Christ,  Christ,'  there  shall  be  many  found 
In  judgment,  further  off  from  Him  by  far 
Than  such  to  whom  His  name  was  never  known." 

And  the  fine  temper  of  the  man  is  shown  in  his  struggle 
against  the  pitiful  obsessions  of  a  provincial  theology  ;  in 
his  gratitude  towards  the  great  Teachers  of  Antiquity,  his 
reverence  for  whom  anticipated  the  Renaissance,  albeit 
the  Greeks  among  them  were  probably  known  to  him  only 
in  Latin  translations.  A  Dante  of  the  Renaissance  —  if 
such  were  possible  —  might  have  placed  Aristotle  and 
Plato  in  Paradise  hy  interposition  of  a  Christ  loving  his 
Gospel  tongue.  Bernardo  Pulci  did,  indeed,  place  Cicero 
and  sundry  Roman  heroes  in  Heaven.  But  even  during 
the  Renaissance  Savonarola  proclaimed  that  Plato  and 
Aristotle  were  in  Hell,  and  the  best  that  Dante  in  his 
rigider  century  could  do  for  them  was  to  put  them  in  a 
painless  Limbo,  which  they  perambulate  "  with  slow  majes- 
tic port,"  acquiring  from  their  continuous  earthly  repu- 
tation grace  which  holds  them  thus  far  advanced,  and  which 
it  seems  not  beyond  all  hoping  may  ultimately  exalt  them 


EXCURSION  INTO  HEAVEN  AND  HELL     327 

to  bliss.  And  with  Aristotle,  the  "  maestro  di  color  che 
siiiino,"  walk  not  only  Homer  and  Euclid,  but  his  Mo- 
hammedan commentator,  Averroes,  and  even  mythical 
figures  like  Orpheus  and  Hector.  A  Christendom  that 
had  never  altogether  lost  touch  with  the  classical  world  — 
were  it  only  by  way  of  Virgil,  mediseval  saint  and  sorcerer 
—  a  Christendom  whose  philosophers  found  ingenious 
inspiration  in  Aristotle,  could  not  easily  relegate  to  the 
flames  either  the  classical  writers  or  their  works.  Classic 
literature  and  mythology  made  a  second  Bible,  as  the  lore 
of  chivalry  and  general  history,  a  third  ;  indeed,  these 
were  the  three  great  circles  in  which  swam  the  world  of 
the  mediaeval  Mappamondo,  the  Biblical  circle  outermost 
and  nearest  to  Heaven.  Yet  it  was  a  bold  stroke  of  tol- 
erance on  Dante's  part  to  make  Virgil  his  guide,  chro- 
nology giving  him  no  chance,  as  it  gave  with  Statins,  of  a 
legendary  conversion  to  Christianity,  And  this  penchant 
for  the  great  Pagans  accentuates  his  intolerance  to  the 
great  Christian  heretics.  But  if  Virgil  himself  was  ex- 
cluded from  Heaven  "  for  no  sin  save  lack  of  faith "  — 
Virgil  who  could  not  possibly  have  believed  —  if  even  the 
merits  of  those  who  lived  before  the  Gospel  could  not 
profit  them  because  they  had  missed  baptism,  it  is  not  sur- 
prising to  find  the  Christian  heretics  collected  in  the  ninth 
canto  in  burning  sepulchres  of  carefully  graduated  tem- 
peratures. One  wishes  that  they,  rather  than  Farinata 
degli  Uberti,  had  held  their  heads  high,  with  a  fine  dis- 
dain foreshadowing  Milton's  Satan.  How  Socrates  would 
have  smiled  over  the  perverted  morality  of  the  Christian 
poet,  as  we  smile  over  the  constricted  foot  of  a  Chinese 
lady!  Despite  the  attempt  of  a  recent  writer  to  moralise 
his  scheme  of  salvation,  the  best  that  can  be  said  for 
Dante  is  that  he  probably  followed  Aquinas  in  holding 
that  there  is  no  positive  pain  in  that  absence  of  the  divine 
vision  which  St.  Chrysostom  made  the  severest  part  of 
the  punishment  of  the  damned.     But  in  tolerance  as  well 


328  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

as  humour  he  falls  far  below  the  Ha-Tofet  weha  Eden 
("  Hell  and  Paradise  ")  of  liis  Jewish  friend  and  imitator, 
Iramanuel.  It  is  in  vain  that  Emile  Gebhart  (in  "  L'ltalie 
Mystique  ")  points  to  his  revolutionary  liberalism  in  plac- 
ing Ripheus  the  Pagan  and  Trajan  the  Roman  Emperor 
in  Paradise.  These  apparent  exceptions  only  bring  out  liis 
lack  of  tolerance  and  humour  more  vividly.  For,  though 
the  ^neid  describes  the  fallen  hero,  Ripheus,  as  "  justis- 
simus  unus  "  among  the  Trojans  and  "  the  most  observant 
of  right,"  yet  it  is  not  by  the  simple  force  of  his  own  good- 
ness but  by  some  complex  operation  of  grace  under  which 
he  believes  in  the  Christ  that  has  not  yet  been  born,  and 
even  turns  missionary,  that  he  penetrates  among  the  "luci 
sante."  As  for  the  Emperor  Trajan,  complexity  is  still 
worse  confounded,  for  he  —  despite  the  title  he  had  won 
of  Optimus  —  must  serve  his  time  in  hell,  and  is  only 
popped  into  Paradise  after  being  resuscitated,  converted 
and  baptized  by  St.  Gregory  four  hundred  years  after  his 
first  decease.  Thus  both  Ripheus  and  Trajan  died  Chris- 
tians, Dante  assures  us  gravely,  not  Gentiles  as  the  world 
imagines  ;  one  believing  in  the  Crucifixion  that  was  to  be, 
and  the  other  in  the  Crucifixion  that  had  been. 

"  Cristiani,  in  ferma  fede 
Quel  de'  passuri,  e  quel  de'  passi  piedi." 

With  all  Dante's  stippling  and  geometric  chart-draAV- 
ing,  his  conception  of  the  after-world  is  not  really  clear. 
The  sinners  are  able  to  deliver  long  monologues,  amid  all 
their  agony  ;  they  foreknow  things  terrestrial,  exactly  like 
the  Manes  of  Paganism  ;  they  quarrel  with  one  another; 
there  are  even  high  jinks  in  Hell,  which  according  to 
Burckhardt  show  an  Aristophanic  humour.  (But  then 
Burckhardt  is  a  German.)  Moreover,  a  certain  free  will 
reigns.  The  undefined  powers  of  the  demons  import  into 
Dante's  excursion  through  their  dominions  a  deal  of  breath- 
lessness  and  terror  from  which  one  should  be  exempt  who 


EXCURSION   INTO   HEAVEN  AND   HELL     329 

travels  with  a  "  safe-conduct "  acquired  by  the  interposition 
of  powerful  personages  in  Paradise. 

Such  are  the  nebulous  rings  hovering  round  Dante's 
Mappamondo  Infernale.  But  the  circles  of  his  Mappamondo 
Terrestre  are  clear  and  resplendent.  'Twas  within  the 
illumination  of  these  circles  —  unnecessarily  narrowing 
though  they  were  —  that  the  Middle  Ages,  and  even  Ages 
later,  built  their  sublime  cathedrals,  painted  their  lovely 
Madonnas,  and  wrote  their  great  poems.  For  though 
doubtless  much  sacred  art  is  merely  splendid  sensuous 
decoration,  and  some  even  of  that  which  is  indubitably 
spiritual  may  have  been  the  work  of  free-thinking  and 
free-living  artists,  it  remains  true  that  the  Dark  Ages  had 
a  light  which  electricity  cannot  replace. 

But  is  our  modern  Mappamondo  as  scientific  as  we  think 
it  ?  Can  we  girdle  it  with  no  circles  amid  which  to  sail 
securely  again  through  the  infinities  ? 


ST.    GIULIA   AND   FEMALE   SUFFRAGE 

Vastly  strange  are  the  wanderings  of  saints  and  pictures. 
When  a  Magnificent  One  ordered  for  his  gilded  sala  a 
Madonna  —  even  with  himself  and  his  consort  superadded 
— he  was,  for  aught  he  knew,  helping  to  decorate  Hampton 
Court  in  Inghilterra,  or  the  mansion  of  a  master-butcher 
in  undiscovered  and  unchristened  Pennsylvania.  And 
when  a  saint  was  born,  an  equal  veil  hid  the  place  of  his 
death  or  of  his  ultimate  patronage.  The  fate  of  St. 
Francis,  to  live  and  die  and  be  canonised  in  his  birthplace, 
was  of  the  rarest.  His  pendant,  St.  Dominic,  came  from 
Old  Castile,  and  was  buried  in  Bologna. 

It  is  no  surprise,  therefore,  to  find  St.  Giulia,  of  Car- 
thage, in  possession  of  Brescia,  though  I  must  confess  that 
until  I  stumbled  upon  the  frescoes  consecrated  to  her  in 
the  Church  of  S.  Maria  del  Solario  her  name  and  fame 
were  unknown  to  me.  Luini  painted  these  frescoes,  the 
sacristan  said,  though  the  connoisseurs  omit  to  chronicle 
them  and  will  doubtless  repudiate  the  attribution.  The 
date  of  1520  appended  to  the  somewhat  free  and  easy 
Latin  epigraph  beneath  does  indeed  bring  them  well 
within  Luini's  working  period,  but  their  authenticity 
interests  me  less  than  the  story  they  tell. 

St.  Giulia,  it  would  appear,  was  born  in  the  seventh 
century  of  a  noble  Carthaginian  family,  and  was  endowed 
with  holy  learning  and  every  spiritual  grace. 

"  Stemate  praesignis  Carthagine  nata  libellos 
Docta  sacros,  anima,  corpus  gestuque  pudica, 
Curatu  patiens,  humilis,  jejuniaque  pollens." 
330 


ST.   GIULIA  AND   FEMALE  SUFFRAGE      331 

Such  a  maiden  could  only  become  an  apostle  to  the  heathen. 
Accordingly,  we  see  her  arrive  at  Corsica  in  a  boat  with 
neither  oar  nor  sail,  and  start  praying  to  the  true  God.  A 
good-natured  citizen  warns  her  of  the  risks  of  such  heresy, 
and  the  kindly  ruler  of  Corsica  himself  adjures  her  to 
discretion,  his  monitions  being  emphasised  by  a  man  with 
an  axe  who  stands  behind  him.  But  holding  her  prayer- 
book,  and  already  crowned  with  her  halo,  she  prays  on. 
The  next  fresco  shows  the  inevitable  sequel.  She  is  hang- 
ing by  her  hair  to  the  bough  of  a  pretty  tree,  while  an  ex- 
ecutioner prods  at  her  bleeding  breasts  with  a  three-pronged 
fork,  though  his  head  is  turned  away,  as  if  he  were  not 
over-proud  of  his  job.  The  kindly  ruler,  however,  con- 
tinues his  remonstrances.  In  the  distance  a  small,  dim 
angel  wings  his  way  to  her.  Finally,  she  is  stretched  on 
a  cross,  and  two  ruffians  batter  her  with  massive  clubs, 
but  angels  hold  the  palm  and  wreath  over  her  head,  and 
the  Dove  flies  towards  her.  These  celestial  visions  are  a 
true  interpretation  and  externalisation  of  the  psychology 
of  the  martyr  :  these  alone  could  support  her.  In  our 
own  day  the  visions  of  our  martyrs  are  less  concrete  ;  they 
die  for  some  far-seen  ideal  of  Justice  or  Freedom,  and  this 
suffices  to  sustain  them  in  Spanish  prisons  or  under  the 
Russian  knout. 

But  what  is  peculiarly  noteworthy  in  the  story  of  Giulia 
is  the  status  of  woman  in  the  Dark  Ages  and  under  the 
Catholic  Church.  St.  Giulia  appears  to  enjoy  as  great  a 
roving  licence  as  St.  Augustine,  her  fellow-citizen  in 
Carthage  and  "The  City  of  God."  She  is  not  considered 
unsexed,  nor  does  her  teaching  rank  below  man's,  and  she 
is  canonised  equally  with  the  male.  In  fact,  in  leaving 
the  home-nest  to  preach  to  the  heathen,  she  is  only  follow- 
ing the  model  of  Thekla  in  the  Apocryphal  "Acts  of  St. 
Paul,"  whose  story,  though  it  was  forged  by  a  pious  elder, 
is  none  the  less  proof  of  woman's  position  in  that  highest 
of  all  ancient  spheres.  Religion.     "  I  recommend  unto  you 


332  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

Phoebe,  our  sister,"  says  the  misogynous  St.  Paul  himself 
(Romans  xvi.),  "  for  she  hath  been  a  suecourer  of  many 
and  of  myself  also.  Greet  Priscilla  and  Aquila,  my  help- 
ers in  Christ  Jesus:  who  have  for  my  life  laid  down  their 
own  necks." 

It  is,  indeed,  doubtful  whether  Christianity  would  ever 
have  been  established  but  for  the  courage  and  companion- 
.ship  of  women.  I  feel  sure  they  tidied  up  the  catacombs 
and  gave  a  feeling  of  home  to  the  crypts  and  caves.  "  It 
was  the  women  who  spread  Christianity  in  the  family," 
says  Harnack.  St.  Augustine's  father  was  a  heathen  ;  it 
was  his  mother,  Monica,  who  taught  him  to  pray.  The 
Virgin  Martyr,  like  Santa  Reparata  of  Florence,  or  St. 
Catherine  of  Alexandria,  is  a  stock  figure  of  the  Roman 
calendar.  As  in  all  great  movements,  differences  of 
station  were  forgotten,  and  Blandine,  the  servant-girl  of 
Lyons,  played  as  majestic  a  part  as  the  royal-blooded  St. 
Catherine,  whose  wheel  of  martyrdom  finds  such  quaint 
perpetuation  as  a  firework. 

Popular  imagination  added  the  Madonna  to  the  Trinity  as 
a  sort  of  female  representative.  In  Tintoretto's  Paradise, 
as  I  have  already  noted,  she  figures  as  authoritatively  as 
the  Christ,  and  in  a  picture  at  Vicenza,  attributed  to  Tiepolo, 
she  stands  on  the  world,  crushing  the  snake  with  her  foot. 

Her  companions  were  usually  divided  in  sex  and  united 
in  glory.  Luca  della  Robbia,  in  his  charming  relief  in 
the  cathedral  of  Arezzo,  scrupulously  places  one  male  and 
one  female  saint  on  her  either  hand,  and  even  one  male  and 
female  angel :  doubtless  had  cherubs  possessed  sex  possibili- 
ties, his  cherubs  too  would  have  been  impartially  distributed. 
In  the  Accademia  of  Florence,  Cimabue's  Madonna  is  en- 
tirely surrounded  by  female  saints,  though  a  few  males 
loom  below  her  throne;  Giotto's  shows  a  female  surplus; 
Bernardo  Daddi's  redresses  the  balance.  Fra  Angelico 
gives  us  Jesus  carried  to  the  Tomb  by  nine  women  to  four 
men. 


ST.   GIULIA  AND   FEMALE  SUFFRAGE      333 

Italian  art  is  full  of  symmetrical  paradises  of  sex-equality, 
and  if  a  church  was  decorated  with  male  saints  down  one 
aisle,  they  would  be  scrupulously  balanced  by  female  saints 
along  the  other.  An  old  Byzantine  Basilica  of  Ravenna, 
which  displays  twenty-two  virgins  arrayed  against  thirty 
saints  of  the  dominant  sex,  first  set  me  wondering  whether, 
since  the  Dark  Ages,  woman  has  not  gone  back  in  Christen- 
dom instead  of  forward.  Here  at  least  was  the  atmo- 
sphere for  the  legend,  if  not  for  the  reality,  of  a  Pope 
Joan,  whereas  at  the  period  in  which  I  first  opened  my 
eyes  upon  the  world  and  wpraan,  she  appears  to  have  be- 
come reduced  to  an  absolute  industrial  dependence  upon 
her  lord,  like  the  fifteenth-century  chicken  in  Giambattista 
della  Porta's  "  Book  of  Natural  Magic."  For  according 
to  the  delightful  recipe  (cited  by  Corvo)  for  inducing 
affection  towards  you  in  a  chicken,  you  must  —  before  it 
has  its  feathers  —  "break  off  its  lower  beak  even  to  the 
jaw.  Then,  having  not  the  wherewithal  to  peck  up  food, 
it  must  come  to  its  master  to  be  fed." 

I  might  cite  in  proof  of  woman's  retrogression  since  the 
Dark  Ages  the  glorification  of  womanhood  through  "  The 
Divine  Comedy,"  but  the  Italian  poet's  translation  of  life 
into  literature  is,  I  fear,  no  more  legal  evidence  of  the  real 
status  of  woman  in  the  Middle  Ages  than  her  chivalrous 
deification  at  the  hands  of  the  Germanic  or  Provencal 
poets  is  a  proof  that  she  was  treated  even  as  an  equal  of 
her  worshippers.  Dante's  unknown  Beatrice  sounds  like 
a  woman  who  was  snubbed  by  her  husband  and  brothers. 
But  Matilda,  who  plays  second  fiddle  to  her,  and  who  is 
equally  drawn  by  Dante  as  a  mild  flower-culling  "  bella 
Donna  "  was  in  reality  the  warrior  Countess  of  Tuscany, 
and  the  fact  that  Dante  feminises  and  floralises  her  shows 
that  he  had  no  real  respect  for  feminine  dominance  in  the 
actual  shapes  it  took  in  life,  and  that  he  was  only  prepared 
to  idealise  woman  on  condition  of  her  conforming  to  his 
ideal. 


334  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

The  scholars  and  commentators  who  have  always  been 
so  puzzled  at  the  metamorphosis  of  Matilda  have  forgotten 
man's  tendency  to  break  off  woman's  beak,  whether  in 
reality  or  in  imagination.  But  even  if  Preger  be  correct 
in  identifying  Dante's  Matilda,  not  with  the  armoured 
Amazon  of  Tuscany,  but  with  Mechtilde,  the  nun,  whose 
mystic  visions  are  the  flowers  she  culls,  it  remains  true  that 
Dante's  ideal  was  never  the  "  Virago,"  a  title  of  honour 
which  was  inscribed  on  her  tomb,  and  which  even  at  the 
epoch  of  the  Renaissance  implied  nothing  but  praise.  The 
word  may  serve  to  remind  us  that  there  is  no  sharp  bisec- 
tion of  qualities  between  the  sexes. 

Matilda  was,  in  fact,  a  sufficient  refutation  in  herself  of 
the  notion  that  there  is  a  rigid  division  between  the 
qualities  of  men  and  women.  Such  a  difference  as  is 
implied  does,  indeed,  exist,  but  it  is  between  men  and  men, 
and  between  women  and  women,  as  well  as  between  men 
and  women,  and  the  popular  nomenclature,  which  calls 
certain  women  mannish  and  certain  men  effeminate,  re- 
cognises the  possibility  of  deviation  from  the  normal. 
Indeed,  considering  that  both  parents  affect  their  child, 
the  attempt  to  breed  a  special  feminine  psychology,  immune 
from  politics  and  fighting,  must  be  perpetually  thwarted 
by  the  criss-cross  action  of  heredity,  as  upon  the  daughters 
of  warriors  and  statesmen.  Matilda —  sired  by  the  Magni- 
ficent Monster,  Boniface  —  was  a  man  in  ten  thousand. 
She  led  her  own  armies.  She  patronised  learning  and 
founded  the  law  schools  of  Bologna.  If  she  kept  her  hus- 
bands in  subjection,  casting  off  one  after  the  other,  she 
had  none  of  the  vices  of  the  male  despot ;  indeed,  her 
second  marriage-contract  stipulated  only  a  sexless  union. 
There  was  nothing,  indeed,  except  these  vices  in  which  she 
ranks  below  the  Magnificent  Monsters  who  preceded  her 
in  the  lordship  of  Lucca  or  Lombardy.  I  must  admit  that 
the  Countess  of  Tuscany  fell  under  the  influence  of  her 
spiritual  director  (as  the  Male  Magnificent  falls  under  the 


ST.   GIULIA  AND  FEMALE  SUFFRAGE      335 

influence  of  his  unspiritual  directress),  and  that  she  used 
her  power,  and  her  treasure,  as  it  is  feared  women  will,  to 
bolster  up  the  Church  ;  in  fact,  she,  with  her  mother 
Beatrice,  attended  the  Council  of  Rome  in  1074,  at  which 
investiture  by  lay  hands  was  declared  illegal,  and  hers  was 
the  Castle  of  Canossa,  to  which  Henry  IV.  came  to  abase 
himself  before  the  Pope.  And  that  dubious  temporal 
power  of  the  Pope's  might  not  have  come  into  such  solid 
being  had  she  not  left  her  possessions  to  the  See  of  Rome, 
and  thus  practically  founded  the  States  of  the  Church. 
This,  of  course,  is  the  secret  of  her  high  position  in  the 
earthly  paradise  of  the  Purgatory.  But,  after  all,  religious 
zeal  is  not  a  female  monopoly,  and  even  Bloody  Mary 
could  not  hold  a  candle  to  Torquemada. 

Catherine  of  Siena  exercised  an  equal  critical  influence 
upon  the  fortunes  of  the  Papacy  and  upon  European 
history  when  she  persuaded  Gregory  XI.  to  move  the 
Papal  seat  back  from  Avignon  to  Rome ;  a  mission  in 
which  Rienzi  had  failed  a  generation  earlier.  Catherine, 
for  all  her  ecstasies  and  self-scourgings,  had  far  more  com- 
mon sense  than  the  male  mystics. 

It  was  in  allowing  for  such  divergences  from  the  normal 
that  the  Dark  Ages  surpassed  our  electric-lit  era,  whose 
logic  confounds  the  optional  with  the  compulsory,  and  the 
individual  with  the  general.  It  was  not  pretended  that 
every  woman  can  or  must  be  a  warrior,  but  she  who  had 
military  genius  was  not  debarred  from  developing  it.  It 
was  not  claimed  that  every  woman  can  or  must  be  a  saint, 
but  St.  Clara  stood  equal  with  St.  Francis  and  St.  Cath- 
erine of  Siena  with  St.  Dominic.  And  at  the  Renaissance 
Boccaccio  devotes  a  book  to  celebrated  females  and  Michel- 
angelo writes  most  humble  love-sonnets  to  the  poetess, 
Vittoria  Colonna  (whose  Rime  still  sell,  and  who  unlike 
Matilda  stood  for  religious  reform).  Vittoria's  noble 
classic  head,  especially  as  seen  helmeted  in  Michelangelo's 
design,  suggests  a  very  Minerva,  and  from  various  quarters 


336  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

we  hear  of  the  political  woman,  the  learned  woman,  the 
patroness  of  the  arts,  and  the  female  physician,  while  at 
the  foot  of  the  staircase  of  Padua  University  stands  a 
statue  of  a  lady  Professor,  a  happier  Hypatia.  I  forget  if 
this  is  Lucrezia  Cornaro,  who  was  made  a  Doctor  of  this 
University  and  a  member  of  so  many  learned  societies 
throughout  Europe,  but  no  enumeration  of  Italian  heroines 
should  omit  her  brilliant  ancestress,  Caterina  Cornaro, 
Queen  of  Cyprus,  whose  court  at  Asolo  was  one  of  the 
centres  of  the  Renaissance. 

"  The  education  given  to  women  in  the  upper  classes," 
says  Burckhardt,  the  learned  historian  of  "  The  Renais- 
sance in  Italy,"  "  was  essentially  the  same  as  that  given  to 
men.  .  .  .  There  was  no  question  of  '  women's  rights'  or 
female  emancipation,  because  the  thing  in  itself  was  a  mat- 
ter of  course.  The  educated  woman  no  less  than  the  man 
strove  naturally  after  a  characteristic  and  complete  in- 
dividuality." 

When  one  remembers  the  struggle  in  nineteenth-century 
England  for  the  higher  education  of  women,  and  particu- 
larly the  desperate  resistance  to  their  studying  and  prac- 
tising medicine,  one  realises  the  fallacy  of  expecting 
melioration  from  the  mere  movement  of  time.  There  is 
no  automatic  progress.  What  is  automatic  is  retrogres- 
sion, so  that  the  price  even  of  stability  is  perpetual  vigi- 
lance. 

But  what  has  St.  Giulia,  born  at  Carthage  and  crucified 
in  Corsica,  to  do  with  Brescia?  I  have  already  pointed 
out  the  free  trade  in  saints,  by  which  they  were  liable  to 
posthumous  export.  St.  Giulia's  body  was  transported 
from  Corsica  by  Desiderio,  a  noble  Brescian,  who  ascended 
the  Longobardian  throne  in  735.  She  was  placed  in  the 
church  dedicated  to  St.  Michael,  the  patron  saint  of  the 
Longobardi,  whom  she  ousted  in  915,  from  which  date 
the  church  was  known  as  St.  Giulia's.  A  Nuimery  of  S. 
Giulia  had  existed  from  about  750,  and  remained  in  being 


ST.   GIULIA   AND   FEMALE  SUFFRAGE      337 

for  over  a  thousand  years,  till  its  suppression  in  1797,  by 
the  inevitable  Napoleon.  Coryat,  who  visited  it  in  1608, 
describes  it  as  having  been  in  time  past  "  a  receptacle  of 
many  royall  Ladies."  It  is  now  a  Museum  of  Christian 
Art,  and  there  I  saw  St.  Giulia  depicted  in  sculpture  by 
Giovanni  Carra,  her  figure  nude  to  the  waist  and  stretched 
on  a  real  wooden  cross  with  real  nails  in  her  hands  and 
feet.     Alas  for  Christian  Art  ! 

To-day  our  St.  Giulias,  in  revolt  against  a  social  order 
founded  on  prostitution  and  sex-inequality,  demand  politi- 
cal rights  as  leverage  for  a  nobler  society,  and,  despite  the 
advice  of  kindly  Rulers,  they  are  as  ready  as  in  the 
seventh  century  to  be  martyred  for  their  faith,  though 
they  have  replaced  the  passivity  of  St.  Giulia  by  measures 
of  aefsfression.  Guariento  foresaw  the  modern  militant 
type  when  he  drew  those  charming  female  angels  with  red 
and  gold  shields  and  long  lances,  and  wings  of  green  and 
gold,  who  stand  on  clouds — "suffragette"  seraphs,  they 
seem  to  me.  You  may  see  a  battalion  of  them  in  the 
Museo  Civico  of  Padua,  filling  a  whole  corridor,  like  a 
procession  in  the  lobby  at  Westminster.  One  of  these 
fair  warriors  trails  by  a  cord  a  black  demon  with  two 
quills  like  white  horns,  doubtless  some  literary  Cabinet 
Minister.  Another  weighs  two  souls  on  scales,  and 
Female  Suffrage  does  indeed  weigh  men's  souls  in  the  bal- 
ance, to  find  them  mostly  wanting.  For  of  all  forms  of 
modern  vulgarity,  I  deem  nothing  more  dreadful  than  the 
scoffing  callousness  towards  the  sufferings  of  the  "  Suffra- 
gettes." They  are  only  self-inflicted,  we  are  told,  as  if 
this  was  not  their  supreme  virtue.  That  in  this  age  of 
blatant  materialism  women  should  still  show  that  they 
possess  souls  is  wondrous  comforting  to  the  idealist, 
tempted  to  believe  that  the  fount  of  living  waters  had  run 
dry,  and  that  Giulia's  only  travels  were  now  made  by 
motor-car  to  smart  country  houses. 

There  is  nothing  which  at  first  sight  seems  more  puz- 


338  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

zling  than  the  wickedness  of  good  people.  For  it  has 
often  been  said  that  the  truly  devout  and  respectable 
Christians  are  the  very  ones  who  would  crucify  Christ 
afresh  if  he  appeared  again,  as  indeed  Arnold  of  Bres- 
cia, who  had  a  touch  of  his  spirit,  was  crucified  by  Em- 
peror, Pope  and  Church.  And  St.  Bernard,  the  inspirer 
of  the  Second  Crusade  to  recover  the  dead  bones  of  Christ, 
played  a  leading  part  in  hounding  him  down,  as  the  Fran- 
ciscans played  a  leading  part  in  hounding  down  Savona- 
rola. 

Now  why  was  St.  Bernard  —  that  santo  sene  who  was 
chosen  by  Dante  to  induct  him  into  the  last  splendours  of 
the  Paradise,  and  whose  noble  hymns  to  Jesus  still  edify 
the  faithful  —  so  blind  to  the  divine  aspects  of  his  victim? 
And  why  is  it  that  the  citizens  of  Ferrara,  whose  excellent 
statue  and  eloquent  tribute  to  their  illustrious  townsman, 
Savonarola,  faced  my  hotel  window,  could  not  be  trusted 
not  to  stone  their  next  prophet  in  a  cruder  sense  of  the 
words  ? 

A  converse  question  will  conduct  us  to  the  answer. 
Why  is  the  hooligan  in  the  gallery  of  the  theatre  ever 
the  chief  friend  of  virtue  ?  Why  is  the  wife-bruiser  the 
most  fervid  applauder  of  the  domestic  sentiment?  Be- 
cause the  man  in  the  gallery  looks  down  on  the  tangle  of 
life  like  the  god  his  name  implies :  he  sees  it  in  as  clear 
perspective  as  the  aeronaut  sees  the  net-work  of  alleys 
through  which  the  pedestrian  blunders ;  the  plot  is 
straightened  out  for  him,  the  villain  duly  coloured,  virtue 
in  distress  plainly  marked  by  beauty  and  white  muslin, 
and  through  no  mists  of  prejudice  or  interest  or  passion 
he  beholds  the  great  outlines  of  right  and  wrong.  'Tis 
to  the  credit  of  human  nature  that,  confronted  with  the 
bare  elementals  of  ethics,  and  freed  from  egoistic  bias, 
the  human  conscience,  even  the  conscience  most  distorted 
in  life,  reacts  accurately  and  returns  a  correct  verdict 
with  the  unfailingness   of   a   machine.     This   it   is   that 


ST.   GIULIA  AND   FEMALE  SUFFRAGE      339 

preserves  the  self-respect  of  the  blackest  of  us,  this  capac- 
ity of  ours  for  seeing  our  neighbours'  sins,  which  is  the 
chief  bulwark  of  public  virtue.  Wherefore,  could  St. 
Bernard  have  seen  Arnold  of  Brescia  as  history  sees  him, 
or  as  a  dramatist  of  insight  would  have  drawn  him,  St. 
Bernard  would  have  been  the  hrst  to  be  horrified  at  St. 
Bernard's  behaviour.  But  a  saint,  no  more  than  a  hooli- 
gan, is  free  from  passions,  interests  and  prejudices  of  his 
own,  especially  an  ecclesiast  and  theologian  and  a  founder 
of  monasteries.  Wilful  and  obstinate  as  are  all  the  saints 
of  my  acquaintance,  the  most  domineering  are  the  cleri- 
cal. For  all  St.  Bernard's  genius  and  holiness,  he  could 
not  endure  a  rival  point  of  view.  By  him,  and  not  by 
this  interloping  Italian  monk,  this  pupil  of  the  critical 
Abelard,  must  the  world  be  turned  to  righteousness ;  nay, 
the  lieresies  of  Abelard  himself  —  "  who  raves  not  reasons  " 
—  must  be  condemned  by  the  Council  of  Sens. 

St.  Bernard,  if  he  lived  to-day,  would  write  the  life  of 
Arnold  of  Brescia  with  holy  horror  at  his  tragic  fate,  and 
to-morrow,  when  the  passions  and  mists  of  to-day  are 
cleared  away,  some  future  Asquith  will  find  a  fresh  stimu- 
lus to  rebellion  against  the  Peers  in  the  noble  sufferings 
of  some  St.  Giulia  of  the  Suffrage. 


ICY  ITALY  :  WITH  VENICE  RISING  FROM 
THE  SEA 


Peccavi.  I  have  painted  Italy,  as  others  use,  in  sun- 
colour  solely.  My  pen  has  been  heliographic.  That  were 
worthy  of  the  tourist  who  knows  Italy  only  in  her  halcj^on 
season.  'Tis  the  obsession  of  the  alliterative  image  of  the 
Sunny  South,  over-riding  one's  historic  metDories  —  stories 
of  the  Po  frozen  over  from  November  to  April,  of  penitents 
standing  barefoot  in  the  snow,  bitter  adventures  of  medi- 
aeval brides  brought  tediously  to  their  lords  across  icy, 
wind-swept  ways  in  a  sort  of  Irish  honeymoon  in  the 
days  before  trains  de  luxe ;  nay,  this  Platonic  concept 
swamps  even  the  Aristotelian  experience.  For  I  have 
seen  Florence  in  a  London  fog  and  Venice  in  a  Siberian 
snowfall.  I  have  seen  St.  Mark's  Square  turned  into  a 
steppe,  without  pigeons,  without  pleasure-pilgrims,  snow- 
muffled,  immaculate,  bleak,  given  over  to  raw-knuckled 
scrapers  and  shovellers,  knee-deep  in  crumbling  hum- 
mocks, or  pushing  snow-heaped  wheelbarrows  towards  the 
providential  water-ways,  the  snow-crusted  Campanile 
towering  over  the  desolate  glacial  plain  like  the  North 
Pole  of  childish  fancy.  Yea,  and  on  the  water-ways 
floated  —  O  horror  of  desecration  —  white  gondolas  ! 
Nature,  like  some  vulgar  millionaire,  had  defied  the 
sumptuary  edict  consecrated  by  immemorial  tradition, 
and,  amazed  as  the  Australian  pioneer  who  first  beheld 
black  swans,  I  watched  these  white  gondolas  gliding  along 
the  swollen  canals.     And  I  recall  Bologna  in  a  blizzard  — 

340 


ICY  ITALY  341 

a  snowfall  so  persistent  that  it  closed  the  Pinacoteca  by 
the  curious  method  of  solidly  overlaying  the  skylight  of 
the  main  gallery  and  rendering  the  pictures  invisible.  It 
was  afesta  for  the  janitors,  a  holiday  fallen  from  heaven. 
In  the  Piazza  Nettuno  the  big  fountain  was  snowed  over, 
and  the  cab-drivers  sat  under  great  hoary  umbrellas  that 
had  hitherto  been  green,  their  cabs  looking  like  frosted 
cakes.  A  white  hearse  passed  still  whiter.  The  snow 
slashed  its  way  even  under  the  colonnades,  and  formed  a 
slippery  coating  of  ice  on  their  pavements.  Bran,  scat- 
tered copiously  in  these  arcades  and  at  all  the  street- 
crossings,  maintained  a  feeble  colour-fight  against  the  all- 
pervading  white. 

There  is  an  icy  Italy  more  boreal  than  Britain,  inasmuch 
as  less  equipped  against  winter.  For  the  native,  too, 
partakes  of  the  Platonic  fallacy,  and  because  his  cold 
season  is  briefer  than  his  warm,  and  oft  infused  with  a 
quickening  radiance,  he  shrugs  it  out  of  existence,  especi- 
ally when  Carnival  invites  to  alfresco  conviviality.  The 
beggar,  indeed,  recognises  the  winter,  as  becomes  a  practi- 
cal professional  man,  and  squats  at  the  church-porch  with 
his  private  pan  of  burning  charcoal ;  but  the  more  irre- 
sponsible burgher,  with  his  stone  floors,  and  his  stoveless, 
chimneyless  rooms,  treats  winter  as  an  annual  exception, 
calling  for  improvised  measures.  He  is  an  festival  animal 
that  builds  for  the  summer,  though  his  brigand-cloak, 
whose  left  fold  is  so  sardonically  thrown  over  his  right 
shoulder,  betrays  to  the  scientific  observer  its  prosaic 
origin  as  the  throat-protector  of  an  Arctic  creature.  Of 
late,  under  the  pressure  of  foreign  finance,  the  better  hotels 
have  veined  themselves  with  steam-pipes.  But  the  steam 
rises  late,  and  the  pipes  are  only  hot  when  the  guest  has 
departed. 

Never  have  I  seen  the  pretence  of  perpetual  summer 
carried  further  than  at  Rimini,  where  in  a  blinding  snow- 
storm, when  every  narrow  archaic  street  was  bordered  with 


342  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

four-foot  mounds  of  dirty  snow,  and  the  traffic  was  limited 
to  donkey-carts  dragging  snow  through  the  Porta  Aurea 
to  pitch  it  into  the  river,  the  congealing  cabmen  sat  all 
day  on  their  powdered  boxes  cheerfully  crying  in  competi- 
tive chorus  —  every  time  they  caught  a  glimpse  of  me  — 
"  To  San  Marino  ?  To  San  Marino  ? "  That  little 
Republic  —  one  of  the  last  political  curios  left,  like  a  fly 
in  amber,  in  modern  Europe  — is  a  drive  of  many  hours, 
even  when  "  the  white  road  to  Rimini  "  is  a  shimmering 
sun-path,  yet  there  was  no  suspicion  of  pleasantry  in  the 
cabmen's  eagerness  to  crawl  through  the  niveous  morass. 
They  seriously  expected  me  to  set  forth  on  this  summer 
expedition,  with  at  most  the  carriage  closed  against  the 
driving  flakes.  It  sorted  better  with  my  humour  to 
plough  afoot  over  the  muffled  Boulevard  to  the  new 
Rimini  which  has  grown  out  of  the  old  rotting  Rimini 
of  Csesar  and  the  Malatestas. 

For  there  is  a  sham  Rimini  as  well  as  a  real  Rimini  — 
one  of  those  toadstools  of  cities  which  flourish  so  rankly 
in  our  century  of  comfort.  This  is  the  Lido  —  an  Italian 
Ostend,  sacred  to  modern  villas,  mammoth  hotels,  bathing 
establishments,  restaurants,  the  surgy  shore  tamed  into  a 
Parade  for  parasols.  There  is  a  staring,  many-windowed, 
many-balconied  Grand  Hotel,  crowned  by  two  baroque 
domes,  with  busts  on  its  fagade  and  vases  at  its  corners 
tapering  up  into  rods.  There  is  a  little  Lawn-Tennis 
Club- Bar  and  a  big  Casino,  with  a  restaurant  terrace  back 
and  front.  There  are  pretentious  Palazzini.  There  is  a 
huddle  of  flaring  houses,  recalling  the  grotesque  "new 
architecture "  of  Madrid,  and  a  large  uncouth  hydro- 
pathic establishment  in  terra-cotta,  and  a  long  row  of 
green  bathing  huts. 

Perhaps  the  profoundest  observation  of  Dickens  in  Italy 
was  that  the  marvellous  quartette  of  buildings  outside  the 
life  of  Pisa  —  the  Cathedral,  the  Campo  Santo,  the  Bap- 
tistery, and  the  leaning  Tower  —  is  like  the  architectural 


ICY  ITALY  343 

essence  of  a  rich  old  city,  filtered  from  its  prosaic  necessi- 
ties. Of  the  Lido  of  Rimini  (and  of  its  likes)  it  may  be 
said  that  they  are  the  architectural  essence  of  a  rich  new 
city,  filtered  of  all  spiritual  and  poetical  values. 

But  the  Lido  I  saw  was  purged  of  all  this  vulgarity, 
buried  under  stainless  snow,  which  lay  deep  and  virgin 
over  every  street  and  grassy  space,  and  shrouded  every 
flaunting  structure  in  primeval  purity.  The  Parade  was 
blotted  out,  restored  to  Nature,  and  deep  drifts  of  snow 
defended  it  from  re-invasion.  The  Casino  lay  forsaken, 
wrapped  in  the  same  soft  spotless  mantle,  the  dual  stone 
steps  leading  to  its  twin  drinking-terraces  transformed 
into  frozen  cascades,  its  central  gates  uselessly  guarded 
by  blanched  barbed  wire.  Desolate  was  even  the  great 
garage,  with  its  cheap  fresco  of  our  modern  goddess  in 
the  car,  her  flamboyant  robe  turned  ermine.  Beyond  the 
buried  Parade,  the  Adriatic  rolled  in  sullenly,  scarce  visi- 
ble save  by  a  gleaming  line  of  surf  that  lit  up  a  narrow 
riband  of  its  foreground ;  all  but  the  breaking  wave  was 
hidden  by  a  wild  whirl  of  flakes  that  misted  sea  and  sky 
into  a  grey  nullity.  Throughout  the  whole  pleasure-city 
not  a  dog  prowled  nor  a  cat  slunk  nor  a  bird  fluttered ; 
not  a  footstep  profaned  the  splendour  of  its  snow.  Its 
myriad  casement-eyes  were  closed  in  heavy  sleep  ;  not  a 
shutter  open,  not  a  blind  raised.  It  was  a  city  hibernat- 
ing like  some  monstrous  Polar  animal.  Not  a  few  pleasure- 
cities  thus  abate  their  vitality  in  the  winter,  but  so  absolute 
a  dormitation  I  have  never  witnessed.  It  seemed  incredi- 
ble that  with  the  Spring  it  would  stir  in  its  sleep,  it  would 
shake  the  snow  off  its  lubberly  limbs,  loose  its  gay  swarm 
of  butterfly-parasols.  How  could  that  frost-bound  terrace 
ever  ring  again  with  the  clink  of  glasses  and  the  tinkle  of 
laughter  ?  How  could  bathers  ever  again  lie  basking  on 
that  frigid  strand  ?  No,  it  was  a  dead  city  I  saw,  a  city 
overwhelmed  by  a  new  ice-age.  And  the  seas  and  lands 
that  radiated  from  this  snowy  centre  were  freezing  too,  as 


344  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

science  had  foretold  ;  swiftly  the  deadly  chill  was  spread- 
ing through  every  vein  and  artery  of  the  nipped  earth, 
curdling  its  springs  and  coagulating  its  vast  oceans  and 
crusting  over  even  its  petty  oases  of  continents  with  thick- 
ribbed  ice  in  which  a  rare  microscopic  rotifer  alone  pre- 
served a  germ  of  vitality.  The  Arctic  and  Antarctic  zones 
expanded  towards  each  other,  like  two  blind  walls  closing 
in  on  life,  and  with  a  clash  of  giant  icebergs  in  a  biting 
equatorial  blast,  the  last  rift  of  green  earth  and  blue  water 
was  blotted  out.  And  now  the  globe  was  spinning  again 
in  a  glacial  void,  as  unconscious  of  the  absence  of  its  skin- 
parasites  as  it  had  been  of  their  presence.  Fated  for  fresh 
adventures  and  new  cosmic  combinations,  the  j)lanet  rolled 
its  impassive  whiteness  through  the  dumb  heavens.  But 
mortals  had  put  on  mortality,  and  of  all  the  haughty  hopes 
and  splendid  dreams  of  man  there  remained  zero.  Earth, 
his  cradle  and  his  pasture,  was  become  his  frigidarium  and 
his  cemetery,  and  the  snow  fell  silently  over  the  few  faint 
traces  of  his  passing.  His  million,  million  tears  had  been 
frozen  into  a  few  icicles. 

II 

And  there  is  an  ugly  Italy,  an  Italy  veiled  by  the  blue 
heaven,  but  revealing  itself  under  sullen  sunless  skies  in 
all  its  naked  hideousness. 

Nothing  could  be  more  unlike  the  popular  conception  of 
Italy  than  the  environs  of  the  Carthusian  Monastery  of 
Pavia  in  mid-February.  Slushy  roads  about  two  yards 
wide,  here  and  there  encumbered  with  fragments  of  brick 
and  stone,  and  everywhere  bordered  by  heaps  of  snow. 
By  one  side  of  the  road  runs  a  narrow  ice-bound  irrigation 
canal,  geometrically  straight,  across  which  rises  the  high, 
bare,  dreary  endless  wall  of  blank  brick  surrounding  the 
monastery.  On  the  other  hand  stretch  the  vast  fields 
with  leafless  thin  trees.  It  was  of  this  region  that  Jehan 
d'Auton  wrote  when  Pavia  was  taken  by  the  French  : 


ICY   ITALY  345 

"Truly  this  is  Paradise  upon  earth."  Even  allowing  for 
the  flowery  meadows  and  running  springs  of  the  end  of 
the  fifteenth  century,  the  worthy  Benedictine  could  have 
found  fairer  Paradises  nearer  Paris.  Much  of  Northern 
Italy  is  still  monotonous  marshland.  Over  the  bald  brick 
wall  of  Mantua,  nine  feet  thick,  that  backs  the  Piazza 
sacred  to  Virgil,  I  gazed  one  morning  at  a  dismal  swampy 
lake,  a  couple  of  barges,  a  factory  chimney,  and  spectral, 
leafless  stumps  of  trees,  the  brownish  soil  of  the  lake  show- 
ing through  the  dead  sullen  water,  a  ghost  of  sun  hovering 
over  rows  of  pollarded  planes.  Here,  methought,  had  Virgil 
found  a  suggestion  for  his  Stygian  marsh.  I  would  not 
say  a  word  against  Mantua  itself,  which  is  most  lovable, 
with  side-canals  that  might  be  Venetian,  and  ever-flowing 
taps  and  old  arches,  arcades  and  buildings.  But  from 
Mantua  to  Modena  I  saw  naught  but  ugly  brown  grass 
over  flat  lands,  with  pollarded  elms  and  vines  stretched 
from  tree  to  tree.  Here  and  there  a  little  canal  relieved 
the  dismal  plain.  Near  Modena  a  few  poplars  appeared. 
A  team  of  lovely  oxen  drawing  a  cart  gave  the  landscape 
its  one  touch  of  beauty. 

Rimini  proper  is  picturesque  enough,  with  its  Porto 
Canale  full  of  small  barques  with  tall  masts.  But  between 
it  and  Ravenna,  what  desolation !  Outside  the  town  the 
gaunt  ruins  of  the  Malatesta  Castle  —  a  bare  wall  and  a 
bare  squarish  rock  —  were  the  prelude  to  the  same  bare 
snowy  plains,  the  same  little  pollarded  elms,  varied  by  tall 
skeleton  poplars.  Once  a  copse  of  firs,  bowed  down  by 
snow,  broke  the  white  flatness.  Near  Classe,  famous  for 
Sant'  Appolinare,  the  waste  became  even  marshier,  sparse 
twigs  of  desolate  shrubs  alone  peeping  through  the  white 
blanket.  Nearer  Ravenna  a  few  signs  of  life  appeared,  a 
dead  cottage,  or  a  living  hovel,  or  a  few  spectral  trees,  or 
a  brick  bridge  over  an  ice-laden  river.  On  such  a  light 
brown  marsh  specked  with  stagnant  pools  the  modern 
Italians  have   put  up  hoardings   with   advertisements   of 


346  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

cognac.  A  little  further  East  their  remote  progenitors 
put  up  Venice  ! 

Never  was  there  so  apparently  hopeless  a  site  as  those 
islands  of  the  lagoons,  preserved  from  malaria  only  by  a 
faint  pulse  of  the  "  tideless,  dolorous  midland  sea."  How 
so  marvellous  a  city  rose  on  the  wooden  piles  of  the 
refugees,  how  out  of  so  dire  a  necessity  they  made  so  rare 
a  beauty  and  so  mighty  a  force,  was  always  a  puzzle  to  me 
till  I  read  that  these  fugitives  before  the  Lombard  Con- 
querors were  Romans  !  Then  it  all  leapt  into  clearness. 
Venice  is  Rome,  in  the  key  of  water  !  The  same  indomi- 
table racial  energy  that  had  built  up  Rome  and  the  Roman 
Empire  built  up  Venice  and  the  Venetian  Empire.  Hunted 
from  Padua,  the  Romans  are  able  to  express  themselves  in 
water  as  powerfully  as  in  earth — to  create  a  new  empire 
in  Italy  and  the  East,  and  build  a  mighty  fleet,  and  crush 
the  Turks,  and  hold  the  carrying  trade  of  the  world,  and 
for  six  centuries  keep  the  Adriatic  as  a  private  lake.  And 
in  this  new  Empire  they  are  touched  by  the  shimmering 
spell  of  water  to  new  creations  of  joyous  colour  on  canvas, 
to  fairy  convolutions  in  marble,  and  a  church  that  rises  as 
lightly  as  a  sea-flower.  For  here  all  that  is  sternly  Ro- 
man 

"  Doth  suffer  a  sea-change 
Into  something  rich  and  strange." 

But  let  us  not  forget  that  despite  her  seven  hills  Rome 
also  began  as  a  pile-village,  and  that  the  Campagna  is  of 
the  same  marshy  character  as  the  soil  around  Venice.  I 
have  more  faith  in  Goethe's  intuition  that  Rome  was 
built  up  by  herdsmen  and  a  rabble  than  in  the  thesis, 
expounded  by  Guglielmo  Ferrero  at  Rome's  last  birthday 
celebration,  that  it  was  the  carefully  chosen  site  of  a 
colony  from  Alba,  with  Romulus  and  Remus  in  their 
traditional  roles.  For  though  her  seven  hills  enabled 
Rome  to  keep  her  head  above  water,  they  did  not  enable 


ICY   ITALY  347 

her  to  keep  her  feet  dry.  The  Forum  August!  was 
anciently  swamp  and  became  a  swamp  again  in  the  Middle 
Ages,  and  once  some  earlier  form  of  gondola  plied  be- 
tween the  Capitol  and  the  Palatine  Hill.  Thus  the  races 
who  hailed  from  Rome  had  water  in  their  blood,  and  the 
instinct  to  build  on  piles.  It  is  a  strange  instinct  which 
races  have  preserved  and  obeyed  —  in  the  foolish  human 
fashion  —  even  on  land  that  was  high  and  dry.  What 
wonder  if  it  survived  in  latency  in  these  ex-Romans  ! 
Yes,  Venice  was  Rome  in  the  key  of  water,  as  Rome 
was  Venice  in  the  key  of  earth.  And  the  Roman  Church 
—  is  she  not  Rome  in  the  key  of  heaven  ?  Is  it  not 
always  the  same  racial  mastery  that  confronts  us,  the 
same  instinct  for  dominance  ?  Does  the  Church  not  hold 
the  after-world  as  Rome  held  the  ancient  world,  does  she 
not  own  the  lake  of  fire  as  the  Doges  owned  the  Adriatic  ? 
Drive  Rome  from  her  throne  on  the  hills  and  she  builds 
up  her  pedestal  again  on  sea-soaked  piles  :  hound  her 
from  the  lagoons,  and  of  a  few  acres  around  the  piazza  of 
St.  Peter  she  makes  the  seat  of  a  sovereignty  even  more 
boundless  and  majestic. 

Hardly  had  I  written  this  when  I  opened  by  hazard 
my  first  edition  of  Byron's  "  The  Two  Foscari  "  (1821), 
and  was  startled  to  read  in  his  appendix  as  follows  :  "  In 
Lady  Morgan's  fearless  and  excellent  work  upon  '  Italy ' 
I  perceive  the  expression  of  '  Rome  of  the  Ocean  '  applied 
to  Venice.  The  same  phrase  occurs  in  '  The  Two  Foscari.' 
My  publisher  can  vouch  for  me  that  the  tragedy  was 
written  and  sent  to  England  some  time  before  I  had  seen 
Lady  Morgan's  work,  which  I  only  received  on  the  16th 
of  August.  I  hasten,  however,  to  notice  the  coincidence 
and  to  yield  the  originality  of  the  phrase  to  her  who  first 
placed  it  before  the  public."  Byron  goes  on  to  explain 
that  he  is  the  more  anxious  to  do  this  because  the  Grub 
Street  hacks  accuse  him  of  plagiarism.  But  turning  to 
the  tragedy  itself,  I  find  that  Byron  has  rather  plagiarised 


348  ITALLOs'   F.lXTASIES 

me  than  the  admirable  "  Gloriana,"  for  her  phrase  might 
be  a  mere  metaphor,  whereas  Marina  observes  explicitly : 

"  And  yet  you  see  how  from  their  banishment 
Before  the  Tartar  into  these  salt  isles, 
Their  antique  energy  of  mind,  all  that 
Remain 'd  of  Rome  for  their  inheritance. 
Created  by  degrees  an  ocean-Rome." 

But  Byron's  over-anxiety  to  disavow  originality  was  due 
to  the  morbid  state  of  mind  induced  by  the  aforesaid 
hacks,  one  of  whom  had  even  accused  him  of  having 
"  received  five  hundred  pounds  for  writing  advertisements 
for  Day  and  Martin's  patent  blacking." 

"  That  accusation,"  says  Byron,  "  is  the  highest  compli- 
ment to  my  literary  powers  which  I  ever  received.*'  I 
can  only  say  the  same  of  Byron's  plagiarism  from  myself. 

But  Byron  need  not  have  been  so  apologetic  to  Lady 
Morgan,  for  'twas  the  very  boast  of  Venice  to  be  "  the 
legitimate  heir  of  Rome,"  whose  Empire  Doge  Dandolo 
re-established  in  that  Nova  Roma  of  Constantinople  with 
whose  art  and  architecture  her  own  is  so  delectably 
crossed. 


THE   DYING   CARNIVAL 

Carnival!  What  a  whirling  word  I  What  a  vision  of 
masks  and  gaiety,  militant  flowers  and  confetti  !  Not  fare- 
well to  meat,  but  hail  to  merriment !  Never,  in  sooth,  does 
Italy  show  so  earthly  as  when,  bidding  adieu  to  the  flesh  and 
the  world,  she  enters  into  the  contemplation  of  the  tragic 
mystery  of  the  self-sacrifice  of  God.  And  yet  in  this  gross- 
ness  of  popular  rejoicing  lies  more  faith  than  in  the  frigid 
pieties  of  the  established  English  Church.  Even  the  brutali- 
ties and  Jew-baitings  that  marked  the  old  Roman  carnival, 
even  the  profane  parodies  of  the  Mass,  sprang  from  a 
naive  vividness  of  belief.  Parody  is  merel}^  the  obverse 
side  of  reverence,  and  'tis  only  when  you  do  not  believe 
in  your  God  that  you  dare  not  make  fun  of  Him  or  with 
Him.  The  gargoyled  gutter  is  as  characteristic  of  the 
cathedral  as  the  mystic  rose-window.  Our  revivals  of 
miracle  plays  are  performed  in  an  atmosphere  of  glacial 
awe,  which  was  by  no  means  the  atmosphere  of  their 
birth.  This  sort  of  reverence  is  too  often  faith  fallen  to 
freezing-point.  We  remove  our  sense  of  humour  as  we 
take  off  our  slippers  at  alien  mosques. 

It  was  when  faith  was  at  its  full  —  near  the  3'ear  1000 
— and  in  connection  with  the  Christmas  season,  that  the 
Patriarch  of  Constantinople  instituted  the  Feast  of  Fools 
and  the  Feast  of  the  Ass,  travestying  the  most  sacred 
persons  and  offices.  The  Lord  of  Misrule  is  no  heathen 
deity,  but  a  most  Christian  majesty  ;  and  King  Carnival 
is  the  spiritual  successor  of  the  old  King  of  Saturnalia, 
whether  Frazer  be  correct  or  not  in  attributing  to  him 
the  direct  succession.     For  the  truly  religious  the  carnival 

349 


350  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

is  necessar}^  to  the  sanity  of  things.  It  is  an  expression  of 
the  breadth  and  complexity  of  the  Cosmos,  whicli  would 
otherwise  be  missing  from  the  Easter  ritual.  The  God  of 
the  grotesque  is  as  real  as  the  God  of  Gethsemane  and  the 
Cosmos  cannot  be  stretched  on  a  crucifix.  It  bulges  too 
oddly  for  that.  And  it  is  this  grotesque  side  of  life  that 
finds  quasi-religious  expression  in  the  Carnival  processions, 
with  their  monsters  known  and  unknown  to  Nature,  with 
their  fanciful  hybrids  and  quaint  permutations  of  the 
elements  of  reality.  Humanity  herein  records  its  joyous 
satisfaction  and  sympathy  with  that  freakish  mood  of 
Nature  which  produced  the  ornithorhynchus  and  the 
elephant,  and  shaped  to  uncouthness,  instead  of  to  sym- 
metry and  beauty.  Alas !  I  fear  humanity  is  only  too 
acquiescent  in  these  deviations  of  the  great  mother  into 
the  grotesque  ;  the  folk-spirit  runs  more  fluently  to  gross 
pleasantry  and  comic  tawdriness  than  to  the  Beautiful, 
and  many  a  Carnival  procession  is  a  nightmare  of  concen- 
trated ugliness. 

The  suspicion  takes  me  that  our  St.  Valentine's  Day, 
so  dominatingly  devoted  to  grotesque  caricature,  and  so 
coincident  with  the  Carnival  period,  is  really  the  Catholic 
Carnival  in  another  guise  and  that  prudish  Protestantism 
has  entertained  the  devil  unawares. 

But  the  Carnival — ^like  St.  Valentine's  Day  —  is  dying. 
It  is  more  alive  in  the  ex-Italian  Riviera  than  in  Italy 
proper.  I  have  a  memory  of  a  Carnival  at  Siena  which 
consisted  mainly  of  one  imperturbable  merry-maker 
stumping  with  giant  wooden  boots  through  the  stony  alleys. 
A  Carnival  at  Modena  has  left  even  less  trace  —  some  dim 
sense  of  more  crowded  streets  with  a  rare  mask.  At 
Mantua,  too,  there  was  no  set  procession  —  children  in 
fancy  dress,  with  a  few  adult  masqueraders,  alone  paid 
fealty  to  the  season.  At  Bologna  the  last  night  of  Car- 
nival was  almost  vivacious,  and  in  the  sleety  colonnades 
branching  off  from  the  Via  Ugo  Bassi  there  was  quite  a 


THE  DYING   CARNIVAL  351 

dense  crowd  of  promenaders  defying  the  bitter  wind, 
while  muffled  groups,  with  their  coat  collars  up,  sat  drink- 
ing at  the  little  tables.  There  were  some  children,  fantas- 
tically pranked,  attended  by  prosaic  mothers,  there  was  a 
small  percentage  of  masked  faces,  while  a  truly  gallant 
cavalier  (escorting  a  dame  in  a  domino)  paraded  his  white 
stockings,  that  looked  icy,  across  the  snowy  roads.  No 
confetti,  and  only  an  infrequent  scream  of  hilarity.  That 
the  old  plaster  missiles,  with  other  crudities,  have  dis- 
appeared, is  indeed  no  cause  for  lamentation,  but  a 
Carnival  without  confetti  is  like  an  omelette  without 
eggs. 

Well  might  a  writer  in  the  local  paper,  II  Resto  del 
Carlino,  lament  the  brave  days  of  old  when  a  vast  array 
of  carriages  and  masks  coursed  through  the  Via  S. 
Mamolo,  and  the  last  days  of  the  Carnival  were  marked 
by  jousts  and  tourneys,  and  tiltings  at  the  quintain,  with 
a  queen  of  beauty  in  white  satin  and  magnificent  masquer- 
aders  showering  flowers,  fruits  and  perfumes,  and  nymphs 
carrying  Cupid  tied  hand  and  foot. 

In  Cremona  I  made  trial  of  a  Veglione  whose  allure- 
ments had  been  placarded  for  days.  A  Trionfo  di  Diana, 
heralded  in  large  letters,  peculiarly  suggested  pomp  and 
revelry.  And  indeed  I  found  a  theatre  almost  as  large  as 
La  Scala,  illumined  by  a  dazzling  chandelier,  with  four 
tiers  of  boxes  resplendent  with  the  shoulders  of  women 
and  the  shirt  fronts  of  men  —  tiaras,  uniforms,  orders,  all 
the  spectacular  social  sublime.  I  had  not  imagined  that 
obscure  Cremona  —  no  longer  famous,  even  for  violins  — 
held  these  glittering  possibilities,  and  it  set  me  to  the 
analysis  that  Italian  theatres  —  above  the  platea  —  are  all 
shop-front,  making  a  brave  show  of  a  shallow  audience, 
for  the  encouragement  of  the  actors  and  its  own  gratifica- 
tion, instead  of  obscuring  and  dissipating  it  over  back 
benches. 

The  stage  and  the  platea  had  been  united  by  an  isthmus 


352  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

of  steps  and  in  an  enclosure  sat  a  full  orchestra.  Around 
the  musicians  danced  men  in  evening-dress  and  a  few 
ladies  in  masks,  most  of  whom,  notwithstanding  the  super- 
abundance of  males,  preferred  to  dance  with  their  own 
sex.  This  was  largely  what  the  spectators  had  come  out 
for  to  see,  and  the  disproportion  of  the  dancers  to  the 
wilderness  of  onlookers  was  the  only  comic  feature  of  this 
Carnival  Ball.  True,  a  few  clownish  figures  clothed  in 
green  and  wearing  little  basket  hats  improvised  mild 
romps  on  the  stage,  and  occasionally  from  the  unexpected 
vantage  of  a  box  shouted  down  some  facetious  remark, 
but  there  was  no  unction  in  them,  nay  not  even  when 
they  capped  the  joke  by  clapping  large  baskets  on  their 
heads.  However,  the  Trionfo  di  Diana  still  remained  to 
account  for  the  vast  audience,  and  there  came  a  moment 
when  an  electric  thrill  ran  through  the  packed  theatre, 
the  dancing  ceased,  and  the  dancers  ranged  themselves, 
looking  eagerly  towards  the  doors.  After  a  period  of  tense 
expectation,  there  came  slowly  up  the  platea  a  few  hunts- 
men with  live  dogs  and  stuffed  hawks,  and  one  melancholy 
horn  that  gave  a  few  spasmodic  single  toots,  whereupon 
appeared  Diana  in  a  scanty  white  robe,  recumbent  on  a 
floral  car  of  foliage  and  roses,  drawn  by  six  hounds,  one  of 
which  alone  rose  to  the  humour  of  the  occasion,  and  by 
his  inability  to  remain  on  his  own  side  of  the  shaft 
achieved  a  rare  ripple  of  laughter,  while  the  applause  that 
followed  his  adjustment  brought  quite  a  wave  of  warmth. 
But  the  chill  fell  afresh,  as  the  procession,  after  a  cheerless 
turn  or  two  on  the  stage,  made  its  exit  as  tamely  as  a 
spent  squib.  A  paltrier  spectacle  was  never  seen  in  a 
penny  show. 

A  runner,  accompanied  by  a  cyclist,  who  pumped  him 
up  with  his  pump,  made  a  fresh  onslaught  upon  our  sense 
of  fun,  but  when  he  too  trailed  off  equally  into  nothing- 
ness, I  quitted  the  dazzling  midnight  scene,  leaving  the 
beauty  and  fashion  of  Cremona  to  its  Carnival  dissipations. 


THE  DYING   CARNIVAL  353 

Yes,  the  Italian  Carnival  is  dying.  Unregretted,  adds 
the  Anglo-French  paper  that  serves  the  select  circles  of 
Rome.  For  it  is  only  the  Carnival  of  the  streets  that  is 
passing,  this  genteel  authority  tells  us  reassuringly.  "  A 
far  more  glorious  Carnival  is  replacing  it.  In  the  grand 
cosmopolitan  hotels  fete  succeeds /e^e." 

Alas,  so  even  the  Carnival  has  passed  over  to  the  Mag- 
nificent Ones,  who  not  content  with  annexing  the  best 
things  in  their  own  lands  sail  under  their  pirate  flag  in 
quest  of  the  spoils  of  every  other,  moving  from  Rome  to 
Switzerland,  from  Ascot  to  Cairo,  with  the  movement  of 
Sport  or  the  Sun.  What  a  change  from  the  days  of  the 
Roman  Fathers,  when  religion  circled  round  one's  own 
hearth,  and  exile  was  practically  excommunication  !  The 
mother-land  is  no  longer  a  mother  but  a  mistress,  to  be 
visited  only  for  pleasure,  and  every  other  land  is  only 
another  odalisque,  devoid  of  sanctities,  ministress  to  appe- 
tites. The  Magnificent  Ones  of  the  Middle  Ages  and  the 
Renaissance  at  least  stayed  at  home  and  minded  their 
serfs  and  their  business  :  our  modern  Magnificent  Ones  go 
abroad,  make  new  serfs  everywhere,  and  mind  only  their 
pleasures.  And  hence  it  is  that  the  festa  of  the  Carnival, 
whose  only  raison  d'etre  was  religious,  whose  only  justifica- 
tion was  its  spontaneity,  is  to  be  annexed  by  the  Magnifi- 
cent Mob,  ever  in  search  of  new  pretexts  for  new  clothes 
and  new  vulgarities.  The  froth  of  pleasure  is  to  be 
skimmed  off  and  the  cup  of  seriousness  thrown  away.  The 
joyousness  that  ushers  in  Lent  is  to  be  torn  from  its  con- 
text as  the  fine  feathers  are  torn  from  a  bird,  to  flutter  on 
the  hat  of  a  demi-mondaine.  The  grand  cosmopolitan 
hotels  with  the  grand  cosmopolitan  rabble  will  usher  in 
with  grand  cosmopolitan  dances  the  period  of  prayer  and 
fasting,  and  the  dying  Carnival  will  achieve  resurrection. 


2a 


NAPOLEON   AND   BYRON   IN   ITALY  :    OR 
LETTERS   AND   ACTION 


As  I  creep  humbly  through  this  proud  and  prodigious 
Italy,  peeping  into  palaces  and  passing  yearningly  before 
masterpieces,  to  the  maddening  chatter  of  concierges  and 
sacristans,  I  am  constantly  stumbling  upon  the  footsteps  of 
him  who  made  the  grand  tour  in  the  high  sense  of  the 
words.  Not  the  British  heir  of  bygone  centuries  with  his 
mentor  and  his  letters  of  introduction,  not  even  his  noble 
father  with  the  family  coach.  No,  these  were  pygmies 
little  taller  than  myself.  Your  sublime  tourist  was  Napo- 
leon, who  strode  over  the  holy  land  of  Beauty  like  a  Brob- 
dingnagian  over  Lilliput.  He  came,  he  saw,  he  com- 
manded. He  looked  at  a  picture,  a  pillar,  a  statue  —  and 
despatched  it  to  France.  He  gazed  at  Lombard's  iron 
crown  —  and  put  it  on.  He  beheld  Milan  Cathedral  — 
and  it  became  the  scene  of  his  coronation,  with  blessing  of 
clergy  and  the  old  feudal  homage.  He  perceived  an  or- 
nate ducal  bed  —  and  slept  in  it,  the  poor  duke  a-cold. 
He  rode  through  the  ancient  streets,  not  Baedeker  but 
cocked  hat  in  hand,  graciously  acknowledging  the  loyal 
cheers  of  the  ancient  stock.  He  examined  the  Sacro 
Catino  in  Genoa  Cathedral  and  bore  it  off  with  its  precious 
blood ;  he  espied  the  rich  treasure  of  Loreto,  and  lo  !  it 
was  his  ;  he  saw  Lucca  that  it  was  fair,  and  it  became  his 
sister  Elisa's.  He  visited  Venice  —  and  wound  up  the 
Republic.  He  admired  St.  Mark's  —  and  haled  its  bronze 
horses  to  Paris,  transferring  to  it  the  Patriarchate  as  in 

364 


NAPOLEON  AND  BYRON  IN   ITALY         355 

compensation.  The  Patriarchal  Palace  itself  he  turned 
into  barracks  ;  superfluous  monasteries  and  churches  were 
shut  up  and  their  lands  confiscated.  He  even  destroyed, 
doubtless  in  the  same  righteous  indignation,  the  lion's 
head  over  "  the  lion's  mouth  "  in  the  Palace  of  the  Doges, 
while  the  Bucentaur,  their  gorgeous  galley,  he  burnt  to 
extract  the  gold. 

But  he  was  not  merely  destructive  and  rapacious.  The 
founder  of  the  Code  Napoleon  repaired  the  amphitheatre  of 
"Verona,  and  resumed  the  neglected  building  of  the  fagade 
of  Milan  Cathedral,  and  opened  up  the  Simplon  route  to 
Italy,  and  marked  its  terminus  by  the  Triumphal  Arch  of 
Milan.  He  surveyed  the  harbour  of  Spezia  for  a  war-har- 
bour and  projected  to  drain  Lake  Trasimeno  away  —  con- 
ceptions which  to-day  are  realities.  And  all  this  and  a 
hundred  other  feats  of  construction  in  the  breathing- 
spaces  of  his  Titanic  single-handed  fight  against  embattled 
Europe.  Not  seldom,  as  I  passed  my  woodshop  in  Venice, 
with  its  caligraphic  placard  AW  Ingrosso  e  al  Minuto,  did 
I  think  of  the  Corsican  Superman,  with  his  wholesale  and 
retail  dealings  with  the  little  breed  of  mankind.  Perhaps 
to  establish  '*  the  Kingdom  of  Italy,"  with  twenty-four 
departments  and  his  step-son  as  viceroy,  and  to  turn  the 
little  district  of  Bassano  into  a  duchy  for  his  secretary 
were,  to  Napoleon,  feats  of  the  same  apparent  calibre. 
Even  so  we  stride  as  carelessly  over  a  brooklet  as  over  a 
puddle.  Surely  there  is  a  fascinating  book  to  be  written 
on  Napoleon  in  Italy,  as  a  change  from  the  countless 
Napoleons  in  St.  Helena  or  the  flood  of  foolish  volumes 
upon  his  mistresses. 

And  a  final  appraisement  of  Napoleon  still  remains  to 
seek.  The  little  fat  man  who  had  "the  genius  to  be 
loved  " —  except  by  Josephine  and  Marie  Louise —  and  who 
provided  for  his  family  by  distributing  thrones,  has  long 
since  ceased  to  be  the  ogre  with  whom  British  babes  were 
frighted,  though  he  has  not  yet  become  Heine's  divine 


356  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

being  done  to  death  by  British  Philistinism.  Carlyle 
classed  him  among  his  "Heroes"  and  credited  him  with 
insight  because,  when  those  around  him  proved  there  was 
no  God,  he  looked  up  at  the  stars  and  asked,  "  Who  made 
all  that  ?  "  But  this  was  surely  no  index  of  profundity 
—  merely  a  theism  of  Pure  Reason  and  an  illustration  of 
Napoleon's  peculiar  interest  in  action.  "Who  made  all 
that  ?  "  Making,  doing,  that  was  his  essential  secret  — 
unresting  activity,  rapid  striking,  utilisation  of  every 
moment.  He  was  as  alert  the  moment  after  victory  as 
others  after  defeat.  Was  one  combination  destroyed,  his 
nimble  and  exhaustless  energy  instantly  fashioned  an  al- 
ternative. Mobility  of  brain  and  immobility  of  soul  — 
these  were  his  gifts  in  a  crisis.  When  all  was  lost  and 
himself  a  captive,  "  What  is  the  use  of  grumbling  ?  "  he 
asked  his  attendants.  "Nothing  can  be  done.'"  The 
tragedy  of  Napoleon  was  thus  the  obverse  of  the  tragedy 
of  Hamlet,  whose  burden  lay  precisely  in  there  being 
something  to  be  done.  Imagine  the  great  demiurge  at 
work  in  these  days  of  telegraphy  and  steam,  motor-cars 
and  aeroplanes.  What  might  he  not  have  achieved  !  As 
it  was,  he  just  missed  creating  the  United  States  of 
Europe.  Anatole  France  accuses  him  of  having  taken 
soldiers  too  seriously.  As  well  accuse  an  engineer  of  tak- 
ing cranes  and  levers  too  seriously.  Soldiers  were  the 
indispensable  instruments  by  which  Napoleon  raised  him- 
self to  the  level  of  those  more  commonplace  rulers  of 
Europe  who  had  found  their  cradles  suspended  on  the 
heights.  It  is  the  German  Emperor  who  takes  soldiers 
too  seriously,  who  marshals  them  with  the  solemnity  of  a 
child  playing  with  his  wooden  regiments.  And  the 
Kaiser,  already  in  the  purple,  has  not  Napoleon's  excuse. 
His  is  simply  a  false  and  reactionary  view  of  life,  as  of  a 
housemaid  who  adores  uniforms.  But  Napoleon  would 
have  played  his  Machiavellian  game  equally  with  grocers; 
and,  indeed,  his  lifelong  ambition  to  sap  British  commerce 


NAPOLEON  AND   BYRON   IN   ITALY         357 

was  conceived  in  the  spirit  of  a  Titanic  tradesman,  who 
knows  better  than  to  count  corpses.  He  was  the  fifteenth- 
century  condottiere  magnified  many  diameters,  playing 
with  countries  and  nations  instead  of  with  towns  and 
tribes,  and  sweeping  in  his  winnings  across  the  green  table 
of  earth  as  in  some  game  of  the  gods.  As  a  Messiah  of 
Pure  Reason,  an  Apostle  of  the  People,  he  was  able,  like 
Mohammed,  to  back  the  Word  with  the  Sword,  and,  less 
veracious  than  the  prophet  of  the  desert,  to  combine  for 
the  making  of  History  its  two  great  factors  of  Force  and 
Fraud.  Through  liim,  accordingly.  History  made  a  leap, 
proceeding  by  earthquake  and  catastrophe  instead  of  by 
patient  cumulation  and  attrition.  He  was  a  cosmic  force 
—  a  force  of  Nature,  as  he  truthfully  claimed  —  a  terre- 
moto  that  tumbled  the  stagnant  old  order  about  the  ears 
of  Courts  and  Churches. 

True,  after  the  earthquake  the  old  slow,  stubborn  forces 
reassert  themselves  ;  but  the  configuration  of  the  land  has 
been  irrevocably  changed.  The  Maya,  the  illusion  of 
Royalty,  comes  slowly  back,  for  it  is  a  world  of  unreason, 
and  even  Bismarck  believed  in  the  divine  right  of  the 
princes  he  despised.  But  the  feudal  order  throughout 
Europe  will  never  wholly  recover  from  the  shock  of 
Napoleon.  Unfortunately,  from  a  Messiah  he  glided  into 
a  Magnificent  One,  and  the  marriage  with  Marie  Louise, 
at  first  perhaps  a  mere  cold-blooded  chess-move  to  estab- 
lish his  dynasty,  subtly  reduced  him  into  accepting 
Royalty  at  its  own  and  the  popular  valuation.  He  had  mar- 
ried beneath  him,  and  Nemesis  followed.  The  dyer's  hand 
was  subdued  to  that  it  worked  in,  and  Napoleon  sank  into 
a  snob.  His  true  Waterloo  was  spiritual.  The  actual 
Waterloo  was  a  moral  victory. 

Had  he  remained  representative  of  the  Republican  or 
any  other  principle,  exile  would  have  had  no  power  over 
him  ;  on  the  contrary,  it  would  have  aggrandised  his  in- 
fluence.    But  his  exile  represented  nothing  but  the  moping 


358  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

of  a  banished  Magnificent,  so  that  a  generous  spirit  like 
Byron  could  find  in  his  "  Ode  to  Napoleon,"  no  words  too 
excoriating  for  this  fallen  meanness. 

And  while  Napoleon  pined  in  St.  Helena,  Marie  Louise 
found  promotion  as  Duchess  of  Parma,  becoming  her  own 
mistress  instead  of  the  world's,  and  finding  husbands  nearer 
down  to  her  own  level  than  the  Corsican  ex-corporal. 
Quite  happy  she  must  have  been,  sitting  on  her  throne 
under  a  great  red  baldachino,  giving  audience,  surrounded 
by  her  suite  and  her  soldiers  —  as  Antonio  Pock  painted 
her  —  or  smothered  in  diamonds  at  neck,  waist,  earrings 
and  hair,  smirking  in  a  low-necked  dress  at  her  crimson 
and  jewelled  crown,  as  in  the  picture  of  Gian  Battisti 
Borghesi.  Parma  preserves  both  these  portraits,  but  they 
are  not  so  quaint  a  deposit  of  the  great  Napoleonic  wave 
as  Canova's  bust  of  Marie  Louise  as  Concord ! 

There  is  in  Milan  a  queer  museum  called  "  The  Gallery 
of  Knowledge  and  Study,"  the  collection  of  which  was 
begun  by  a  "  Noble  Milanese,"  and  the  first  catalogue  of 
which  was  published  in  Latin  in  1666.  Here,  amid  sea- 
shells,  miniatures,  old  maps,  pottery,  bronzes,  silkworm 
analyses,  and  old  round  mirrors  in  great  square  frames, 
may  now  be  seen  a  pair  of  yellow  gloves  which  once  cov- 
ered the  iron  hands,  together  with  the  cobbler's  measure 
of  that  foot  which  once  stamped  on  the  world.  There  is  an 
air  of  coquetry  about  the  pointed  toe.  A  captain's  brevet, 
signed  by  the  "  First  Consul "  and  headed  "  French  Re- 
public," serves  as  a  reminder  of  the  earlier  phase.  The 
humour  of  museums  has  placed  these  relics  in  a  case  with 
those  of  other  "  illustrious  men  "  —  to  wit,  two  Popes  and 
St.  Carlo,  the  dominant  saint  of  the  district  (who  is  just 
celebrating  his  tercentenary). 

But  the  Triumphal  ^rch  remains  Napoleon's  chief  monu- 
ment at  Milan,  though  it  is  become  a  sort  of  Vicar  of  Bray 
in  stone.  For  when  Napoleon  fell,  the  Austrian  Emperor 
replaced  the  chronicle  of  French  victories  by  bas-reliefs  of 


NAPOLEON  AND  BYRON   IN   ITALY         359 

defeats,  and  re-christened  it  an  Arch  of  Peace.  And  when 
in  turn  Lombardy  was  liberated  by  Victor  Emmanuel,  new 
inscriptions  converted  it  into  an  Arch  of  Freedom.  One 
can  imagine  the  stone  singing,  like  the  Temple  of  Memnon 

at  sunrise : 

"  But  whatsoever  king  shall  reign, 
Still  7'11  be  the  Arch  of  Triumph." 

And  in  Ferrara  there  is  a  Triumphal  Column  no  less 
inconstant.  Designed  to  support  the  statue  of  Duke 
Ercole  I.,  it  was  annexed  by  Pope  Alexander  VII.,  who 
was  deposed  by  Napoleon,  whose  statue  has  now  been 
replaced  by  Ariosto's.  Whether  the-ducal-papal-military- 
poetic  pillar  supports  its  ultimate  statue,  we  may  doubt, 
though  a  poet  seems  less  obnoxious  to  political  passion 
than  the  other  sorts  of  hero. 

Such  mutations  in  the  significance  of  monuments,  how- 
ever they  deface  and  blur  history,  are  not  unnatural 
amid  the  vicissitudes  of  Italy :  and,  after  all,  an  arch  or  a 
pillar  is  but  an  arch  or  a  pillar. 

But  even  a  statue  that  keeps  its  place  is  not  safe  from 
supersession.  In  Rimini  in  1614  the  Commune,  grateful 
to  the  Pope  (Paolo  V.),  commemorated  him  in  bronze  in 
the  beautiful  Piazza  of  the  Fountain,  the  Fountain  whose 
harmonious  fall  pleased  the  ear  of  Leonardo  da  Vinci. 
The  monument  is  elaborate  and  handsome,  with  bas-reliefs 
in  the  seat  and  in  the  Papal  mantle,  showing  in  one  place 
the  city  in  perspective.  But  during  the  Cisalpine  Re- 
public, thanks  again  to  Napoleon,  no  Pope  could  keep  his 
place  in  Rimini,  and  as  the  simplest  way  of  preserving  him 
on  this  favoured  site,  the  municipality  erased  his  epitaph 
and  re-christened  him  St.  Gaudenzo.  Gaudenzo  was 
the  martyr  Bishop  of  Rimini,  the  Protector  of  the  City. 
This  unearned  increment  was  not  the  Saint's  first,  for  the 
Church  of  S.  Gaudenzo  had  been  erected  on  the  basis  of  a 
Temple  of  Jove.  To  annex  the  glories  of  both  Jove  and 
Pope  is   indeed   a   singular   fortune,  even  in  the  ironic 


360  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

changes  and  chances  we  call  history.  But  Napoleon,  in 
the  days  when  he  ordered  the  Temple  of  Malatesta  to  be 
the  Cathedral  of  Rimini,  was  annexing  even  the  functions 
of  both  Pope  and  Jove.  For  he  was  also  rearranging 
Europe  after  Austerlitz  and  giving  the  quietus  to  the 
Holy  Roman  Empire. 

II 

Only  second  to  the  impact  of  Napoleon  on  Europe  was  the 
impact  of  Byron.  'Tis  Csesar  and  Hamlet  in  contemporary 
antithesis,  for  Professor  Minto  has  well  said  that  Byron 
played  Hamlet  with  the  world  for  his  stage.  While  Byron 
was  soliloquising  with  his  pen,  Napoleon  was  energising 
with  his  sword,  and  whether  the  pen  was  really  the  mightier 
of  the  twain  is  a  nice  thesis  for  debating  societies.  But  in 
Italy,  and  by  the  greatest  modern  Italian  poet,  Byron  has 
been  acclaimed  as  a  man  of  action.  In  my  hotel  in  Bologna 
the  landlord  had  piously  —  or  witli  an  eye  to  custom  — 
suspended  a  tablet,  commissioned  from  Carducci,  whereof 
a  translation  would  run  as  follows: 

"  Here 
In  August  and  September  1819 
Lodged 
And  Conspired  for  Liberty 
George  Gordon,  Lord  Byron, 
"Who  Gave  to  Greece  His  Life, 
To  Italy  His  Heart  and  Talent, 
Than  Who 
None  Arose  Among  The  Moderns  More  Potent 
To  Accompany  Poetry  With  Action, 
None  IMore  Piously  Inclined 
To  Sing  The  Glories  and  Adventures 
Of  our  People." 

An  epigraph,  I  fear,  involving  some  poetic  licence. 
True,  of  course,  that  no  modern  poet's  life  or  work,  save 
Browning's,  is  so  interpenetrated  with  Italy.  But  Byron's 
amateur  relation  with  the  futile  Italian  conspirators  of  the 


NAPOLEON  AND  BYRON  IN  ITALY        361 

generation  before  Garibaldi  was  a  somewhat  shadowy  con- 
tact with  action,  however  generous  his  impatient  ardour 
for  Italy's  resurrection.  Vaporous,  too,  was  the  conspiracy 
of  "  The  Liberal "  to  pour  new  wine  into  the  old  British 
beer-bottle.  But  even  his  membership  of  the  Greek  com- 
mittee or  the  equipment  of  a  bellicose  brig  against  Turkey, 
or  his  abortive  appointment  as  Commander-in-Chief  in  an 
expedition  against  Lepanto,  scarcely  brings  Byron  into  the 
category  of  men  of  action.  He  had  never  the  chance  of 
sloughing  Hamlet  for  Ceesar  or  even  for  the  Corsair.  It 
was  not  even  given  him  to  die  in  battle,  as  he  so  ardently 
desired  in  the  last  verse  of  his  last  poem.  And  though 
his  Hellenic  fervour  redeemed  his  closing  days  from  de- 
spair and  degradation,  still  the  fever  which  slew  him  at 
Missolonghi  hardly  warrants  the  claim  that  he  gave  his 
life  for  Greece.  Had  his  microbe  met  him  in  marshy 
Ravenna  instead  of  marshy  Missolonghi,  would  it  have 
been  said  that  he  died  for  Italy?  For  aught  we  know  his 
sea  voyage  from  Genoa  to  Greece  may  have  lengthened  his 
life. 

Moreover  it  was  as  an  ideologue  that  Byron  plunged 
into  affairs.  For  the  Greeks  whom  he  set  out  to  deliver 
figured  in  his  mind  as  direct,  if  degenerate,  descendants  of 
the  great  free  spirits  of  old,  the  creators  of  Hellenic  culture: 
the  reality  was  a  priestridden  population  debased  by  Slav 
stocks. 

Byron  had  indeed  an  opulence  of  temperament  which 
naturally  spilt  over  into  action.  Like  Sir  Walter  Scott, 
he  was  larger  than  a  writing  man,  and  he  brought  the 
Scott  sanity  rather  than  the  Byronic  ebullience  into  his 
three  months'  work  at  Missolonghi,  holding  himself  aloof 
from  factions  and  thus  reconciling  them  in  him,  throwing 
his  weight  on  the  side  of  humanity,  and  even  rising  beyond 
his  disappointment  in  the  Greeks  to  perceive  that  their 
very  failings  made  their  regeneration  only  the  more  neces- 
sary.    There  was  certainly  in  him  the  making  of  a  leader 


362  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

of  men.  Nevertheless  cerebral  ferment  and  not  conspir- 
ing for  liberty  was  his  essential  form  of  activity.  That 
cerebral  ferment  was  never  more  ebullient  and  continuous 
than  in  those  years  of  Italy  and  the  Countess  Guiccioli. 
Ravenna  was  his  favourite  town,  and  action  is  not  precisely 
the  note  of  Ravenna  at  whose  town-gate  I  read  with  my 
own  eyes  a  fabulous  prohibition  against  vehicular  traffic 
in  the  streets. 

But  did  we  concede  Carducci's  claim  to  the  full,  and 
even  suj^plement  it  by  Byron's  passing  eagerness  to  mould 
British  politics,  the  Italian  poet's  characterisation  of  him 
as  the  most  striking  modern  instance  of  the  union  of 
poetry  and  action,  is  a  startling  reminder  of  the  poverty 
and  vacuousness  of  the  chronicle  of  singing  men  of  affairs. 
If  Byron  be  indeed  Eclipse,  truly  the  rest  are  nowhere. 
And  the  question  arises,  why  the  modern  man  should  be 
so  artificially  bifurcated,  ^schylus  was  both  soldier  and 
poet.  Caesar  not  only  made  history  but  wrote  it.  Dante 
was  Prior  of  Florence. 

"  In  rebus  publicis  administrans,"  says  the  inscription 
on  the  absurd  tomb  of  Ariosto,  and  we  know  that  Duke 
Alfonso  sent  him  to  suppress  bands  of  robbers  in  lawless 
Garfagnana  as  well  as  on  that  even  more  formidable  ex- 
pedition to  the  Terrible  Pontiff  who  had  excommunicated 
the  ruler  of  Ferrara.  Chaucer  was  a  diplomatist  and 
Government  OfGcial.  The  ethereal  singer  of  "  The  Faerie 
Queene  "  shared  in  the  bloody  attempt  at  the  Pacification 
of  Ireland.  Milton,  that  virulent  pamphleteer,  barely 
escaped  the  block.  Goethe  administered  Weimar.  Victor 
Hugo,  like  Dante,  achieved  exile.  Bjornson  contributed 
to  the  independence  of  Norway.  The  notion  of  a  poet  as 
aloof  from  life  seems  to  be  largely  modern  and  peculiarly 
British.  Shelley  is  probably  responsible  for  this  concep- 
tion of  the  "  beautiful  and  ineffectual  angel,"  and  in  our 
own  day  Swinburne  has  helped  to  carry  on  the  legend. 
But  Swinburne's  fellow-poet,  the  self-styled  "  Singer  of  an 


NAPOLEON  AND  BYRON   IN   ITALY         363 

empty  day,"  was  precisely  the  poet  who  had  the  largest 
relations  with  life,  and  whose  wall-papers  have  spread  to 
circles  where  his  poetry  is  unknown  or  unread. 

You  may  say  that  Virgil,  who  was  neither  modern  nor 
British,  practised  the  same  attitude  of  detachment,  the 
same  exclusive  self-consecration  to  letters  as  Words- 
worth or  Tennyson.  But  Virgil  had  a  people  to  express, 
and  Wordsworth  and  Tennyson  were  passionate  politicians, 
if  they  made  no  incursions  into  action  proper.  You  may 
urge  that  the  bards,  skalds,  minstrels,  troubadours,  ballad- 
mongers,  jongleurs,  have  always  been  a  class  apart  from 
action,  but  these  were  at  least  landers  of  action,  laureates 
of  lords,  while  even  the  Minnesingers  celebrated  less  their 
own  mistresses  than  those  of  the  heroes.  'Tis  a  parasitism 
upon  action,  to  which  indeed  the  meek  and  prostrate  Kip- 
ling would  confine  the  role  of  letters. 

But  why  should  the  power  to  feel  and  express  the  finer 
flavours  of  life  and  language  paralyse  the  capacity  for  ac- 
tion ?  In  the  sanest  souls  both  functions  would  co-exist 
in  almost  equal  proportions.  Sword  in  one  hand  and 
trowel  in  the  other,  Ezra's  Jews  rebuilt  the  Temple,  and 
the  new  Jerusalem  will  not  rise  till  we  can  hold  both  trowel 
and  tablet.  In  that  Platonic  millennium  poets  must  be 
kings  and  kings  poets. 

That  fantastic,  mutilated,  myopic  and  inefficient  being, 
known  as  "  the  practical  man,"  sniffs  suspiciously  at  all 
movements  that  have  thought  or  imagination,  or  an  ideal 
for  their  inspiration.  It  may  be  conceded  to  this  crippled 
soul  that  action  can  never  take  the  rigid  lines  of  theory, 
and  that  the  forces  of  deflection  must  modify,  if  not  indeed 
prevail  over,  the  a  priori  pattern.  But  he  is  not  truly  a 
thinker  whose  thought  cannot  allow  for  these  deviations  in 
practice,  which  are  as  foreseeable  (if  not  as  exactly  comput- 
able) as  the  retardation,  acceleration  or  aberration  of  a 
planet  by  the  pull  of  every  other  within  whose  attraction 
it  rolls.     Action  is  not  pure  thought,  but  applied  thinking 


364  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

—  a  species  of  engineering  over,  through  or  around  moun- 
tains, and  opposing  private  domains.  "  Life  caricatures 
our  concepts,"  a  dreamer  complained  to  me,  after  lie  had 
stepped  down  into  politics.  Is  it  not  perhaps  that  our 
concepts  caricature  life  ?  Life  is  too  fluid  and  asymmetric 
to  bear  these  fixed  forms  of  constructive  polity,  and  Lord 
Acton  tells  us  that  in  the  whole  course  of  history  no  such 
rounded  scheme  has  ever  found  fulfilment.  I  do  not 
wonder. 

But  the  poet  who  has  never  acted  on  the  stage  of  affairs 
is  moving  in  a  padded  world  of  words,  and  the  hero  who 
has  never  sung,  or  at  least  thrilled  with  the  music  in  him, 
is  only  subhuman.  The  divorce  of  life  and  letters  tends 
to  sterilise  letters  and  to  brutalise  life.  The  British  mis- 
trust of  poetry  in  affairs  has  a  solid  basis —  of  stupidity. 
Imagination,  which  is  the  essential  factor  in  all  science,  is 
esteemed  a  Jack  o'  Lantern  to  lure  astray.  And  to  tap 
one's  way  along,  inch  by  inch,  without  any  light  at  all,  is 
held  the  surest  method  of  progression. 

But  Italy,  which  has  known  Mazzini,  is,  I  trust,  for  ever 
saved  from  this  Anglo-Saxon  shallowness. 

"  A  Revolution  is  the  passing  of  an  idea  from  theory 
into  practice,"  said  Mazzini.  And  again,  "  Those  who 
sunder  Thought  and  Action  dismember  God  and  deny  the 
eternal  Unity  of  things."  Pensiero  e  Azione  was  the  sig- 
nificant title  of  the  journal  he  founded  to  bring  about  the 
redemption  of  Italy.  Garibaldi  too  was  a  dreamer,  who 
even  wrote  poetry.  Cavour,  the  most  worldly  of  the  trio 
of  Italian  saviours,  owes  his  greatness  precisely  to  the 
imagination  which  could  use  all  means  and  all  men  to  educe 
the  foreseen  end. 

A  sharp  distinction  should  be  drawn  between  those  who 
dream  with  their  eyes  open,  and  those  who  dream  with 
their  eyes  shut.  What  Cavour  saw  was  in  congruity  with 
fact  and  possibility.  Prevision  is  not  perversion.  As  our 
modern  watcher  of  the  skies  received  the  photograph  of 


NAPOLEON  AND  BYRON  IN   ITALY         365 

Halley's  Comet  upon  his  plate  half  a  year  before  it  became 
visible  to  the  eye,  and  months  before  it  revealed  itself  to 
the  farthest-piercing  telescope,  so  upon  the  sensitised  soul 
coming  events  cast  their  configurations  before.  This 
foresight  of  insight  has  naught  in  common  with  the  night- 
mares and  chimoeras  of  sleep.  "  The  prophetic  soul  of  the 
wide  world  dreaming  on  things  to  come  "  admits  the  elect 
to  glimpses  of  its  dream.  These  be  the  prophets,  conduits 
through  which  the  universe  arrives  at  self-consciousness, 
as  the  heroes  are  the  conduits  through  which  it  arrives  at 
self-amelioration. 


THE  CONSOLATIONS  OF  PHLEBOTOMY:  A 
PARADOX  AT  PAVIA 

In  a  room  leading  to  the  Senate  in  the  Ducal  Palace  of 
Venice  I  was  looking  at  a  picture  by  Contarini  of  the 
conquest  of  Verona  by  the  Venetians  in  1405. 

'Twas  a  farrago  of  fine  confused  painting,  horses  asprawl 
over  the  dead  and  wounded,  men  in  armour  driving  their 
daggers  home  in  the  prostrate  huddled  forms,  galloping 
chargers  viciously  spurred  by  helmeted  knights  with 
swirling  swords,  in  brief  an  orgie  of  wild  and  whirling 
devilry.  The  pity  of  it,  I  thought,  Verona  and  Venice, 
those  two  fairy  sisters,  each  magically  enthroned  on  beauty, 
members  of  the  same  Venetia,  peopled  with  the  same  stock, 
speaking  almost  the  same  dialect,  why  must  they  be  at 
each  other's  throat  ?  And  this  revelry  of  devihy  might, 
I  knew,  equally  serve  for  Venice's  conquest  of  any  other 
of  her  neighbours  in  that  wonderful  fighting  fifteenth  cen- 
tury of  hers,  when  she  must  needs  set  up  her  winged  lion 
in  every  market  place. 

And  these  rivalries  of  Venice  and  her  neighbour-towns, 
I  recalled,  were  only  part  of  the  universal  urban  warfare 
—  Genoa  against  Pisa,  Siena  against  Florence,  Gubbio 
against  Perugia  ;  these  again  breaking  into  smaller  circles 
of  contention,  or  intersected  with  larger,  party  against 
party,  faction  against  faction,  guild  against  guild,  Guelph 
against  Ghibelline,  Montague  against  Capulet,Oddi  against 
Baglioni,  popolani  against  grandi,  provinces  against  in- 
vaders, blood-feuds  horrific,  innumerable,  the  Guelph- 
Ghibelline  contest  alone  involving  7200  revolutions  and 
700  massacres  in  its  three  centuries!     And  yet  there  is 

366 


THE  CONSOLATIONS   OF  PHLEBOTOMY       367 

a  reverse  to  the  shield,  and  a  jewelled  scabbard  to  the 
sword. 

I  stood  later  in  the  Palazzo  Malaspina  of  Pavia  where, 
tradition  says,  the  imprisoned  Boethius  composed  "  The 
Consolations  of  Philosophy,"  and  here  in  a  vestibule  my 
eye  was  caught  by  a  fragment  of  gilded  gate  hung  aloft, 
and  running  to  read  the  explanatory  inscription,  I  found 
it — in  translation — as  follows: 

"  These  Remnants  of  the  Old  Gates  of  Pavia 

Thrice  Trophies  in  Civil  Wars 

By  a  Magnanimous  Thought  Restored  by  Ravenna 

Are  To-day  an  Occasion  for  Rejoicing 

Betwixt  the  Two  Cities  Desirous 

Of  Changing  the  Vestiges  of  the  Old  Discords 

Into  Pledges  of  Union  &  Patriotic  Love 
The  XIII  day  of  September  MDCCCLXXVIII." 

Un  magnanimo  pensiero,  indeed !  And  —  like  the  chains  of 
Pisa's  ancient  harbour  restored  by  Genoa — a  pleasant  se- 
quel to  the  noble  common  struggle  for  Italian  indepen- 
dence. And  yet — the  advocatus  diahoU  whispered  me,  or 
was  it  the  shade  of  Boethius  in  quest  of  "  The  Consolations 
of  Phlebotomy  "  ?  —  "  What  has  become  of  Pavia,  what  of 
Ravenna,  since  they  ceased  to  let  each  other's  blood? 
Where  is  the  Pavia  of  a  hundred  towers,  where  is  the 
Castello  reared  and  enriched  by  generations  of  Visconti 
Dukes,  and  its  University,  once  the  finest  in  Italy,  at  which 
Petrarch  held  a  chair  ;  where  is  the  opulence  of  life  that 
flowed  over  into  the  Certosa,  now  arid  in  its  mausolean 
magnificence  ?  Where  is  the  Ravena  whose  lawyers  were 
as  proverbial  in  the  eleventh  century  as  Philadelphia's  are 
to-day,  where  is  that  hotbed  of  heresy  which  nourished  the 
great  anti-Pope  Guibert  ?  Where  is  even  the  Ravenna 
of  Guido  da  Polenta,  protector  of  Dante?  Apt  indeed  to 
hold  only  Dante's  tomb.  And  its  young  men  who  bawl 
out  choruses  of  a  Sunday  night  till  the  small  hours  —  do 
they  even  deserve  the  shrine  of  the  poet  of  Christendom  ? 


368  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

And  Venice?  And  Verona?  And  the  Rimini  of  the 
sixty  galle3's  ?  What  have  they  gained  from  their  cokjur- 
less  absorption  into  a  United  Italy,  compared  with  what 
they  have  lost  —  had  indeed  already  lost  —  of  peculiar  and 
passionate  existence  ?  Are  there  two  gentlemen  of  Verona 
now  in  whom  we  take  a  scintilla  of  interest  ?  Is  there  a 
merchant  of  Venice  whose  ventures  concern  us  a  jot?  Is 
there  a  single  Antonio  with  argosies  bound  for  Tripolis 
and  the  Indies  ?  "  Your  Ben  Jonson,"  and  by  his  wide 
postliumous  reading  I  knew  'twas  Boethius  speaking  now, 
"said  'in  short  measures  life  may  perfect  be.'  He  should 
have  said  '  in  small  circles '  and  perhaps  '  onli/  in  small 
circles.'  All  America  —  with  its  vasty  breadths  —  stands 
to-day  without  a  single  man  of  the  first  order." 

" 'Tis  not  even" — put  in  the  advocatus  c?^aJo?^,  betrayed 
by  his  unphilosophic  chuckle — "as  if  the  destruction  of 
small  patriotisms  meant  the  destruction  of  war.  Pavia 
and  Ravenna,"  he  pointed  out  mischievously,  "must  con- 
tinue to  fight  —  as  part  of  the  totality,  Italy.  And  be- 
hold," quoth  he,  drawing  my  eyes  towards  the  Piazza 
Castello,  "  the  significance  of  that  old  castle's  metamor- 
phosis into  a  barrack — the  poetry  of  war  turned  to  prose, 
the  frescoes  of  the  old  Pavian  and  Cremonese  painters 
faded,  perhaps  even  whitewashed  over,  and  rough  Govern- 
ment soldiers  drilling  where  the  Dukes  played  pall-mall. 
Gone  is  that  rich  concreteness  of  local  strife,  attenuated 
by  its  expansion  into  a  national  animosity  ;  not  insubstan- 
tial indeed  under  stress  of  invasion,  but  shadowy  and 
unreal  when  the  casus  belli  is  remote,  and  by  the  man- 
oeuvres of  my  friends,  the  international  diplomatists,  the 
Pavian  or  Ravennese  finds  himself  fighting  on  behalf  of 
peoples  with  whom  alliance  is  transitory  and  artificial." 

"  But  he  will  not  find  himself  fighting  so  often,"  I 
rejoined.  "Countries  do  not  join  battle  as  recklessly  as 
cities.  The  larger  the  bulk  the  slower  the  turning  to 
bite."     "And    meantime,"    interposed    the    philosophic 


THE  CONSOLATIONS   OF  PHLEBOTOMY     369 

shade,  "  the  war-tax  in  peace  is  heavier  than  anciently  in 
war.  And  neither  in  war  nor  in  peace  can  there  be  the 
joy  of  fighting  that  comes  from  personal  keenness  in  the 
issue.  The  wars  of  town  with  town,  of  sect  with  sect,  of 
neighbour  with  neighbour,  so  far  from  being  fratricidal 
and  unnatural,  are  the  only  human  forms  of  war.  'Tis 
only  neighbours  that  can  feel  what  they  are  fighting  for, 
'tis  only  brothers  that  can  fight  with  unction.  The  very 
likeness  of  brothers,  their  intimate  acquaintance  with 
the  points  of  community,  gives  them  an  acute  sense  of  the 
points  of  difference,  and  provides  their  combat  with  a 
solid  standing-ground  at  the  bar  of  reason.  Least  irra- 
tional of  all  internecion  were  the  fratricide  of  twins. 
Save  the  war  of  self-defence,  civil  war  is  the  only  legiti- 
mate form  of  war.  Military  war — how  monstrous  the 
sound,  what  a  clanking  of  mailed  battalions!  Your  Bacon 
betrays  but  a  shallow  and  conventional  sense  of  '  The 
True  Greatness  of  Kingdoms,'  when  he  compares  civil 
war  to  the  heat  of  a  fever,  and  foreign  war  to  the  heat  of 
exercise  which  serves  to  keep  the  body  in  health.  For 
what  is  foreign  war  but  an  arrogance  of  evil  life,  an 
inhuman  sport,  a  fiendish  trial  of  skill?  Why  should  a 
home-born  Briton  ever  fight  a  Russian?  His  boundaries 
are  nowhere  contiguous  with  the  Russian's,  his  very  notion 
of  a  Russ  is  mythical.  'Tis  a  cold-blooded  war-game  into 
which  he  is  thrust  from  above.  What's  Hecuba  to  him 
or  he  to  Hecuba  ?  Other  is  it  with  warfare  that  is  per- 
sonal, profoundly  felt.  Civil  war — how  sacred,  how 
close  to  men's  bosoms  !  When  Greek  meets  Greek,  then 
comes  the  tug  of  war." 

"In  religious  wars,  too,"  eagerly  interrupted  the  advoca- 
tus  diaboli,  "'tis  nearness  that  is  the  justification  —  Ho- 
moousian  versus  Homoiousian.  Why  in  heaven's  name," 
he  added  with  a  spice  of  malice,  "should  a  Mussulman 
cry  haro  against  a  Parsee  or  a  Shintoist  against  a  Mor- 
mon?    Here,   too,   the   boundaries   are   not   contiguous; 

2b 


370  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

'twere  the  duel  of  whale  and  elephant.  'Tis  the  Christian 
sects  that  must  naturally  torture  and  murder  one  another," 
he  wound  up  triumphantly. 

"  Ay  indeed,"  serenely  assented  the  shade  of  Boethius. 
"  If  fighting  is  to  be  done  at  all,  let  it  be  between  brothers 
and  not  between  stranger.  Where  '  but  a  hair  divides 
the  False  and  True '  'tis  of  paramount  importance  to  de- 
termine on  which  side  of  the  hair  we  should  stand.  This 
rigid  accuracy  is  the  glory  of  Science  —  why  should  not 
our  decimal  be  correct  to  nine  places  even  in  Religion  ? 
Why  wave  aside  these  sharp  differences  for  which  the 
men  of  my  day  were  willing  to  pay  with  their  lives? 
When  your  Alfred  the  Great  translated  my  magnum  opus, 
or  even  as  late  as  when  your  Chaucer  honoured  me  with  a 
modern  version,  these  questions  could  vie  in  holy  intensity, 
almost  with  your  latter-day  questions  of  Free  Trade  and 
Tariff  Reform." 

"  Ah,  the  palmy  days  of  martyrdom,"  sighed  the  advo- 
catus  diaboU,  "when  men  were  literally  aflame  for  filioque 
or  Immaculate  Conception.  O  for  the  fiery  Arians, 
Gnostics,  Marcionites,  Valentinians,  Socinians,  Montanists, 
Donatists,  Iconoclasts,  Arnoldites,  Pelagians,  Monophy- 
sites,  Calixtines,  Paulicians,  Hussites,  Cathari,  Albigenses, 
Waldenses,  Bogomilians,  Calvinists,  Mennonites,  Baptists, 
Anabaptists " 

"  Surely  you  would  not  call  Baptists  fiery?  "  I  interjected 
feebly.  He  had  apparently  no  sense  of  humour,  this  ad- 
vocatus,  for  he  went  on  coldly :  "  How  tame  and  disap- 
pointing these  latter-day  sectarians :  these  Methodists, 
Plymouth  Brethren,  Christian  Scientists,  Irvingites, 
Christadelphians  '  et  hoc  genus  omne.'  I  did  have  a  flash 
of  hope  when  your  Methodists  began  to  split  up  into 
Wesleyans,  Protestant  Methodists,  Reformers,  Primitives, 
Bryanites  and  the  like,  whose  bitter  brotherly  differences 
seemed  to  show  the  old  sacrosanct  concern  for  the  minutiae 
of  Truth  and  Practice.     But  no  I  no  one  believes  nowa- 


THE  CONSOLATIONS  OF  PHLEBOTOMY     371 

days,  for  nobody  burns  his  fellow- Christian.  Even  the 
burning  words  of  your  King's  Declaration !  " 

"  August  shade,"  I  interrupted,  pointedly  addressing 
myself  to  the  last  of  the  Roman  philosophers,  "  I  concede 
that  when  Christianity  founded  itself  on  texts,  an  infinite 
perspective  of  homicidal  homiletics  lay  open  to  the  in- 
genuous and  the  ingenious.  And  so  long  as  Heaven  and 
Hell  turned  on  dogma  and  ritual,  an  infinite  significance 
attached  to  the  difference  between  the  theological  twee- 
dledum and  the  theological  tweedledee,  so  that  it  is  just 
dimly  conceivable  one  might  murder  one's  neighbour  for 
his  own  good  or  the  greater  glory  of  God.  But  do  not 
tell  me  that  to-day,  too,  the  test  of  belief  is  bloodshed." 

"  Immo  vero,'"  cried  the  Roman  shade  emphatically. 
"  Was  I  not  clubbed  to  death  because  I  believed  in  Justice 
and  combated  the  extortions  of  the  Goths  ?  A  belief  for 
which  we  would  not  die  or  kill,  what  is  it  ?  " 

"  A  bloodless  belief,"  chuckled  the  advocafus  diaholi, 
who,  I  suddenly  remembered,  was  more  legitimately  en- 
titled the  defensor fidei. 


RISORCxIMENTO  :   WITH    SOME    REMARKS    ON 
SAN  MARINO  AND  THE  MILLENNIUM 

"  II  Calavrese  abate  Giovacchino 
Di  spirito  profetico  dotato." 

Dante  :  Paradiso,  Canto  xii. 
"Pater  imposuit  laborem  legis,  qui  tinior  est;  filius 
imposuit  laborem discipliupe,  qui  sapientia  est;  spiritus 
sanctus  exhibet  libertatein,  quse  amor  est." 

JoAcniM  OF  Flora  :  Liber  Concordice,  ii. 


"  Italy  is  too  long,"  said  the  Italian.  We  were  coming 
into  Turin  in  the  dawn,  amid  burning  mountains  of  rosy 
snow,  and  the  train  was  moving  slowly,  in  hesitation, 
with  pauses  for  reflection.  "  The  line  is  single  in  places," 
he  explained.  "  Italy  is  too  narrow,  too  cramped  by 
mountain-chains,  and  above  all  too  long.  It  is  the  trouble 
behind  all  our  politics.  There  are  three  Italics,  three 
horizontal  strata,  that  do  not  interfuse  —  the  industrial 
and  intelligent  North,  the  stagnant  and  superstitious 
South,  and  the  centre  with  Rome  which  is  betwixt  and  be- 
tween." 

"  But  there  is  far  more  clericalism  in  the  North  than 
the  South,"  I  said.  "  The  Church  party  is  a  political 
force." 

"  Precisely  what  proves  my  case.  In  the  North  every- 
thing is  more  efficient,  even  to  the  forces  of  reaction. 
The  clericals  are  better  organised,  and  are,  moreover,  sup- 
ported by  the  propertied  atlieists  in  the  interests  of  order. 
But  the  North  is  Europe — Germany,  if  you  will  —  the 
South  is  already  Africa."  The  train  stopped  again. 
He  groaned.     "  No  unity  possible." 

372 


RISORGIMENTO  373 

"  No  unity  ?  "  I  exclaimed.  "  And  what  about  Gari- 
baldi and  Mazzini  and  United  Italy  ?  " 

"  It  is  a  phrase.     Italy  is  too  long." 

I  pondered  over  his  words,  and  in  imagination  I  saw 
again  all  the  Risorgimento  museums,  all  the  tablets  in  all 
the  loggias  and  town  halls  recording  those  who  had  died 
for  the  Union  of  Italy,  all  the  statues  of  all  the  heroes,  all 
the  streets  and  piazzas  dedicated  to  them,  while  in  my  ears 
resounded  all  the  artillery  of  applause  booming  at  that 
very  moment  throughout  the  length  and  narrowness  of 
Italy  in  celebration  of  the  Jubilee  of  the  Departure  of  the 
Thousand  from  Quarto. 

II 

Any  one  who  goes  to  Italy  for  the  Renaissance  will  find 
the  Risorgimento  a  discordant  obsession  ;  flaunting  itself 
as  it  does  in  brand  new  statues  and  monuments  whose  incon- 
gruity of  colour  or  form  destroys  the  mellow  unity  of  old 
Cathedral-piazzas  or  Castello-courtyards.  Florence  has 
managed  to  hush  up  the  Risorgimento  in  back  streets  or 
unobtrusive  tablets,  and  Venice  with  her  abundance  of 
Campi  has  stowed  it  out  of  sight,  though  Victor  Emmanuel 
ramps  on  horseback  not  far  from  the  Bridge  of  Sighs,  and 
"  three  youths  who  died  for  their  country  "  intrude  among 
the  tombs  of  the  Doges.  The  essence  of  Pisa  is  preserved 
by  its  isolation  from  life,  leaving  Mazzini  to  dominate  the 
city  of  his  death.  But  the  majority  of  the  old  towns  are 
devastated  by  the  new  national  heroes  —  admirable  and 
vigorous  as  the  sculpture  sometimes  is  —  even  as  the  old 
historic  landmarks  are  obliterated  by  the  new  street  names. 
And  in  addition  to  the  pervasive  quartette — Garibaldi, 
Cavour,  Victor  Emmanuel,  Mazzini  —  local  heroes  aggra- 
vate the  ruin  of  antiquity.  Daniele  Manin  thrones  in 
Venice  over  a  winged  lion  sprawling  beneath  a  triton ; 
Ricasoli,  "  the  iron  Baron,"  rules  in  Tuscany ;  Pavia  is 
sacred  to  the  Cairoli;  Minghetti  runs  through  the  Romagna; 


374  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

Crispi  through  the  South  ;  Genoa  devotes  a  street,  a  square, 
and  a  bronze  statue  to  Bixio,  the  Boanerges  of  the  epic ; 
Viareggio  has  just  put  up  a  tablet  to  Rosolino  Pilo  and 
Giovanni  Corrao,  the  daring  precursors  of  the  Thousand ; 
even  Rubattino — patriot  in  his  own  despite  —  has  his 
statue  in  Genoa  harbour,  on  the  false  ground  that  he  put 
his  shipping  line  at  Garibaldi's  disposal.  'Tis  a  very 
shower  of  stones,  falling  on  the  just  and  the  unjust  alike. 
And  sometimes — as  at  Asti  —  all  the  Heroes  are  United  be- 
neath a  riot  of  granite  monoliths  and  marble  lions. 

And  even  the  ubiquitous  heroes  have  peculiar  glory  in 
their  peculiar  haunts.  Cavour  is  gigantic  at  Ancona 
(probably  because  the  town  was  freed  by  Piedmontese 
troops)  ;  he  stands  in  the  castle  of  Verona,  over-brooded 
by  snow  mountains  :  at  Turin,  his  birthplace.  Fame  wildly 
clasps  him  to  her  breast  in  a  mammoth  monument,  crying, 
"  Audace,  j)rudente,  libero  Italia." 

A  Vanity  Fair  without  a  hero  I  have  never  chanced  on. 
Little  Chiavari  has  its  grandiose  angel-strewn  monument 
to  Victor  Emmanuel,  whom  Parma  likewise  exhibits  flour- 
ishing his  sword ;  Pesaro  breaks  out  in  tablets  to  those  who 
died  fighting  "  the  hirelings  of  the  Tlieocracy  "  ;  Rimini  has 
a  Piazza  Cavour ;  priest-ridden  Vicenza  shelters  a  statue  of 
Mazzini ;  Assisi  itself,  waking  from  its  saintly  slumber, 
consecrates  a  Piazzetta  to  Garibaldi,  and  a  street  to  the 
Twentieth  of  September,  on  which  Italian  troops  broke 
into  Rome ! 

Ah,  Garibaldi,  Garibaldi,  how  thou  didst  weigh  on  my 
wanderings !  From  Mantua  to  Ferrara,  from  Spoleto  to 
Perugia,  Garibaldi,  always  Garibaldi.  I  fled  to  dead  Ra- 
venna, lo  !  thou  didst  tower  in  the  very  Piazza  of  Byron ; 
to  Parma,  and  rugged,  imposing,  in  thy  legendary  cap, 
leaning  on  thy  sword,  thou  didst  obsess  the  Piazza  Gari- 
baldi ;  to  Rome  itself,  and  twenty  feet  high,  thou  impend- 
edst  in  bronze,  with  battle  pieces  and  allegories  around 
thee ;  I  retreated  to  the  extremest  point  of  the  Peninsula, 


RJSORGIMENTO  375 

and  found  myself  in  the  Corso  Garibaldi  of  Reggio ;  I 
crossed  to  Sicily,  only  to  stumble  against  thy  great  horse 
in  Palermo  and  the  monument  to  thy  valour  in  Calatafimi. 
For  of  the  statesman,  the  monarch,  the  prophet  and  the 
soldier  who  combined  to  redeem  Italy,  it  is  naturally  the 
soldier  that  is  stamped  most  vividly  on  the  popular  imagi- 
nation, the  noble  freelance  whom  the  mob  deemed  divine 
even  before  his  death,  whose  memory  the  people  has  res- 
cued from  the  anti-climax  of  his  end,  selecting  away  his 
follies  and  mistakes  and  idealising  his  virtues,  under  the 
artistic  law  of  mythopoiesis,  till,  shaped  and  perfected  for 
eternal  service,  the  national  hero  shines  immaculate  in  his 
sacred  niche. 

And  yet,  as  the  streets  show,  even  the  popular  imagina- 
tion has  realised  that  the  soldier  would  not  have  sufficed. 
Thrice  blessed,  indeed,  was  Italy  to  possess  Cavour  and 
Mazzini  at  the  same  hour  as  Garibaldi.  It  is  a  fallacy  to 
suppose  that  the  hour  always  finds  the  man,  or  the  man 
the  hour,  or  that  "il  n'y  a  pas  d'homme  indispensable." 
Many  an  hour  passes  away  without  its  man,  as  many  a  man 
without  his  hour.  Great  men  perish,  wasted,  because  there 
are  no  forces  for  them  to  synthetise  :  great  forces  remain 
inarticulate,  unorganised  and  ineffective,  because  they  have 
found  no  leader  to  be  their  conduit.  All  the  more  marvel- 
lous that  Italy  should  have  produced  simultaneously  three 
indispensable  men,  Mazzini,  Cavour,  and  Garibaldi,  each 
of  whom  had  something  of  the  other  two,  yet  something 
unique  of  his  own.  None  of  the  three  quite  understood 
the  others,  and  Mazzini,  who  was  much  like  Ibsen's  Brand, 
was  even  more  intolerant  than  Garibaldi  of  the  Machia- 
vellian policies  of  Cavour,  and  had  to  be  swept  aside  as  a 
visionary.  For  one  heroic,  impossible  moment,  indeed, 
the  spirit  triumphed,  the  Republic  of  Rome  was  born,  and 
idealism  enjoyed  perhaps  its  sole  run  of  power  in  human 
history.  But  with  the  disappearance  of  the  Republic, 
Mazzini  might  have  disappeared  too,  for  all  his  influence 


376  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

upon  the  political  Risorgimento ;  did  indeed  practically 
disappear  by  acquiescing  in  the  battle-flag  of  Monarchy. 
Garibaldi  and  Cavour  sufficed  to  create  the  combination 
of  Force  and  Fraud  by  which  political  history  is  made. 
For  though,  if  any  sword  might  ever  bear  the  words  I  saw 
on  a  sword  graven  by  Donatello  —  "  Valore  e  Giustitia  " 
—  that  sword  was  Garibaldi's,  and  if  ever  passion  was 
patriotic  it  was  Cavour's,  nevertheless  the  liberation  of 
Italy  did  not  escape  being  achieved  by  the  usual  factors 
of  Force  and  Fraud. 

Ill 

And,  in  addition  to  all  these  busts,  statues,  allegories, 
tablets,  pillars,  cairns,  lions,  bas-reliefs,  wreaths,  lists  of 
heroes,  records  of  plebiscites  anent  annexations,  loggias 
whence  Garibaldi  orated ;  in  addition  to  all  the  Piazze 
Garibaldi  and  Victor  Emmanuel,  all  the  Corsi  Cavour  and 
Mazzini,  all  the  streets  of  the  Twentieth  of  September 
and  other  heroic  dates,  there  is  the  specific  Museum  of  the 
Risorgimento  from  which  no  tiniest  town  is  immune.  To 
see  one  is  practically  to  see  all.  With  the  same  piety  with 
which  their  ancestors  collected  the  relics  of  the  saints,  the 
modern  Italians  have  collected  the  relics  of  their  heroes 
and  the  war — swords,  sticks,  photographs,  crude  paint- 
ings and  engravings,  old  hats,  letters,  tricoloured  scarves, 
medals,  pictures,  patriotic  money,  helmets,  epaulettes, 
broken  bombs,  cannon-balls,  cartoons,  caricatures,  faded 
wreaths,  autographs,  sculptures,  crosses,  proclamations, 
prayer-books,  pictures  of  steamers  conveying  insurgents ! 
And  Garibaldi  !  What  town  has  not  some  shred  of  the 
"  Genius  of  Liberty,"  as  the  tablet  in  the  old  castle  of  Fer- 
rara  styles  him — his  flask,  his  sword,  his  shirt,  his  gun, 
his  letters,  his  telegrams  !  Peculiarly  sacred  is  the  red 
shirt  which  he  wore  at  Aspromonte,  though  it  recalls  the 
ironic  fact  that  when  the  charmed,  invincible  hero  was  at 
last  wounded  and  captured,  it  was  by  soldiers  of  the  king 


RISORGIMENTO  377 

he  had  created  and  of  the  Italy  whose  triumph  he  was  seek- 
ing to  consummate.  Something  Miltonic  seems  to  emanate 
from  that  red  shirt : 

"  That  flaming  shirt  which  Garibaldi  wore 
At  Aspromonte." 

But  for  the  rest,  all  these  relics  are  as  ugly  as  the  relics  of 
the  saints.  Beautiful  and  exalting  as  are  the  Museums  in 
reality,  with  their  record  of  sacrifice  and  patriotism  in  one 
of  the  most  wonderful  chapters  of  history,  infinitely  touch- 
ing as  is  every  yellow  letter  or  worn  glove,  when  imagi- 
nation has  transfused  it,  these  glass  cases  are  outwardly 
depressing  to  the  last  degree  —  a  warning  to  the  Realist, 
and  a  proof  that  Art  in  expressing  the  soul  of  a  phenome- 
non is  infinitely  truer  in  its  beauty  than  Nature  unselected 
and  unadorned.  The  wooden-legged  curator  of  Bologna, 
who  lost  his  leg  at  Solferino,  is  a  mere  stumping  old  bore ; 
the  little  photograph  of  twenty-four  Garibaldians  minus 
arms  or  with  crutches  is  simply  discomforting.  Even  the 
story  of  the  modern  mother  of  the  Gracchi,  Adelaide  Cairoli, 
who  gave  four  sons  to  her  country,  exhales  but  tepidly  from 
the  picture  at  Pavia  of  a  middle-aged  lady  in  a  bonnet  sur- 
rounded by  young  soldiers  in  variegated  costumes. 

"  Leonessa  d'ltalia,"  cried  Carducci  to  Brescia,  and  the 
one  word  of  the  poet  wipes  out  all  the  crude  photographs 
and  grandiose  inscriptions  by  which  that  seemingly  pro- 
saic town  asserts  its  heroism  ;  one  ceases  even  to  smile  at 
the  tablet  at  the  foot  of  the  castle  hill,  veiling  a  defeat 
in  the  guise  of  ferocious  Austrian  charges,  "  frequently  " 
repulsed.  From  a  mock  passport  of  Radetsky  in  the  Vi- 
cenza  Museum  I  got  a  more  vivid  sense  of  the  racial  hatred 
than  from  all  the  relics  and  tablets  :  "  Birth  :  Bastard  of 
the  seven  deadly  sins.  Age  :  Eighty-two,  sixty-five  of 
which  have  been  passed  in  robbing  Austria  of  the  money 
she  stole.  Eyes  :  Of  a  bird  of  prey.  Nose  :  Of  a  Jew. 
Mouth  :  Open  for  the  swallowing  of  divorce!  Beard  : 
Nothing.    Hair  :  Enough.    Visage  :  Not  human.  Occupa- 


378  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

tion  :  Projector  of  Conquests.  On  the  field  of  battle 
always  at  the  tail ;  in  the  destruction  of  unarmed  cities 
always  at  the  head.  Country:  No  country  will  own 
him.  Signature  :  The  last  five  days  of  his  stay  in  Milan 
have  paralysed  him  and  he  cannot  sign.  Vise:  Good  for 
nowhere."  And  my  most  lively  realisation  of  the  trans- 
formation wrought  in  Europe  since  1820  came,  not  from  a 
Risorgimento  museum  nor  from  an  official  history,  but 
from  a  black-and-white  engraving  of  Raphael's  Sposa- 
lizio  "dedicated  humbly"  by  Giuseppe  Longhi  in  1820 
"  to  the  Imperial  Royal  Apostolical  Majesty  of  Francesco 
I.,  Emperor  of  Austria,  King  of  Jerusalem,  Hungary,  Bo- 
hemia, Lombardy,  Venice,  Dalmatia,  Sclavonia, .  Galicia, 
Laodomiria,  lUyria,  &c.  &c." 

IV 

Even  those  streets  or  buildings  that  are  free  from  the 
Risorgimento  are  pitted  with  records  or  statues.  Padua 
records  with  equal  pride  how  Dante  had  his  exile  sweet- 
ened by  the  hospitality  of  Carrara  da  Giotto,  and  how 
Giovanni  Prati,  the  singer  of  to-day,  lived  in  the  Via  del 
Santo.  Verona  celebrates  impartially  Catullus  and  some 
minor  poet  whose  name  I  forget,  if  I  ever  knew  it,  "  who 
by  making  sweet  verses  obtained  a  fame  more  than  Italian." 
Ferrara  has  a  positive  leprosy  of  white  plaques.  Bassano 
is  not  a  great  city,  but  "  there  is  enough  celebrity  in  Bas- 
sano," writes  Mr.  Howells,  "to  supply  the  whole  world." 
Things  were  apparently  not  always  thus  ;  for  when  Childe 
Harold  went  on  his  pilgrimage  he  demanded  to  know 
where  Dante,  Petrarch,  and  Boccaccio  were  buried. 

"  Are  they  resolved  to  dust, 
And  have  their  country's  marbles  naught  to  say? 
Could  not  her  quarries  furnish  forth  one  bust  ?  " 

Could  her  quarries  possibly  furnish  forth  one  more  bust, 
was  the  question  that  came  to  me  on  my  later  pilgrimage. 


RISORGIMENTO  379 

Too  much  to  say  have  their  country's  marbles.  No  poet 
could  lodge  a  night  at  a  house  but  for  all  time  his  visit 
must  be  graven ;  every  local  lawyer  or  engineer  is  be- 
come a  world- wonder  ;  it  is  recorded  where  "  the  inventor 
of  the  perpetual  electric  motor  "  died ;  even  an  assassina- 
tion must  be  eternalised  in  a  tablet.  As  for  a  room  in 
which  conspirators  met  to  smoke  and  plot,  it  is  for  ever 
glorified  and  sanctified. 

I  was  relieved,  when  I  did  go  to  Carrara, 

"  Nei  monti  di  Luni,  dove  ronca 
Lo  Carrarese," 

to  find  the  supply  of  marble  from  its  fabular  mountains 
still  held  out,  but  the  chief  occupation  of  the  town  seemed 
to  consist  in  cutting  it  into  slabs  with  great  many-bladed 
machines.  Slowly  the  grim  knives  descended,  slicing  the 
stone,  while  a  spray  moved  to  and  fro  to  prevent  its  over- 
heating by  friction.  And  as  I  watched  these  plaques 
gradually  grinding  into  separate  existence,  I  heard  them 
beginning  to  babble  their  lapidary  language,  bursting  into 
eloquent  inscriptions  to  unknown  celebrities  —  chemists, 
town  councillors,  hydrographers,  economists  —  nay,  com- 
memorating the  Risorgimento  itself  in  some  village  yet 
ungrown.  "  Rome  or  Death,"  they  cried  stonily,  and 
"Italy  to  her  Sons,"  and  "Ci  siamo  e  ci  resteremo." 
And  the  knives  sank  lower  and  lower,  and  the  glories 
rose  higher  and  higher,  and  the  spray,  hissing,  continued 
to  throw  cold  water  on  the  enthusiasm,  like  some  cynic 
observing  it  was  easier  to  celebrate  the  old  heroism  than 
under  its  continuous  inspiration  to  create  the  new.  Car- 
rara itself  —  though  one  would  think  it  took  marbles  as  a 
confectioner  takes  tarts  —  has  its  memorials  of  Garibaldi 
and  Mazzini,  besides  that  more  ancient  monument  to 
Maria  Beatrice  overbrooded  by  the  magic  mountains. 

To  what  cause  shall  we  ascribe  this  hypertrophy  of  self- 
consciousness  since  Childe  Harold's  day  ?  Is  it  due  to  the 
Risorgimento,  or  the  pleasure-pilgrims,  or  is  some  of  it 


380  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

inspired  by  William  Walton,  canny  British  Guglielmo,  to 
whom  the  municipality  of  Carrara  has  erected  one  of  his 
own  tablets  for  his  services  in  stimulating  the  industry? 
Is  it  William  Walton  who  forces  all  this  glory  upon  Italy? 
Is  it  he  who  creates  all  this  hero-worship?  Perugino  is 
no  new  discovery,  yet  not  till  1865  —  341  years  after  his 
death  —  did  the  Commune  of  Perugia  put  up  a  tablet  on 
that  steep  street  which  leads  to  his  modest  one-storied 
house,  while  Carducci,  though  not  even  a  native,  already 
looks  out  from  the  Carducci  Gardens  towards  the  rolling 
snow-mountains  on  the  horizon.  To  this  same  1865  be- 
longs the  imposing  Dante  Monument  in  the  Piazza  Santa 
Croce  of  Florence.  But  the  six-hundredth  anniversary 
of  a  poet  is  a  trifle  late  for  his  appearance  in  his  native 
city.  True,  it  had  taken  him  only  two  hundred  years  to 
force  his  way  into  Florence  Cathedral,  but  that  was  merely 
as  a  painting  on  wood.  The  statue  of  Correggio  in  Parma 
(of  course  in  the  Piazza  Garibaldi)  was  not  erected  till 
1870.  Tasso  has  been  "the  great  unhappy  poet"  for 
three  centuries.  Yet  not  till  1895  did  Urbino  think  it 
necessary  to  record  his  visit  to  the  city  as  the  guest  of 
Federigo  Bonaventura.  As  for  Raphael,  Urbino's  own 
wonder-child,  that  thirty-six  foot  monument  to  him  dates 
only  from  1897  !  All  these  testimonials  to  Art  would  be 
a  little  more  convincing  if  the  straight  iron  bridges  with 
which  Venice  and  Verona  have  insulted  their  fairy  waters 
did  not  prove  —  like  the  flamboyant  technique  of  the 
modern  Italian  painter — that  Italy  has  left  her  art  period 
irrevocably  behind. 

And  the  great  knives  of  Carrara  go  grinding  on,  "  ohne 
Hast,  ohne  Rast,"  inexorably  supplying  celebrity.  Like 
the  Greece  of  the  decadence,  Italy  has  reached  its  stone 
age,  an  age  which  seems  the  symptom  of  spent  vigour, 
the  petrifaction  of  what  once  was  vital.  Nor  is  it  easy  to 
recognise  Mazzini's  soldiers  of  humanity  in  a  nation 
whose  prophet  is  d'Annunzio,  whose  "  smart  set "  repeats 


RISORGIMENTO  381 

the  morals  of  the  Renaissance  without  its  genius,  whose 
masses  appear  to  spend  their  lives  in  lounging  about 
the  streets  smoking  long  black  slow-lighting  cigars,  or 
patronising  the  innumerable  pastrycooks.  It  seems  a 
slight  return  for  all  the  heroic  agony  of  the  Risorgimento 
that  Europe  should  be  supplied  with  an  efficient  type  of 
restaurant,  and  a  vividly  gesturing  waiter,  who  dissects 
himself  in  discussing  tlie  carving  of  the  joint. 

"  Scuola  di  inagnanimi  Sen  si, 
Auspicata  promessa  dell'  Avvenire," 

cries  a  memorial  tablet  at  Brescia,  but  the  ennoblement 
and  the  promise  of  the  future  are  less  obvious  than  the 
orgy  of  nationalistic  sentiment.  And  when  I  read  how 
at  the  recent  meeting  in  North  Italy  between  their  King 
and  the  Czar,  Italian  citizens  submitted  to  being  treated 
like  Russians  during  a  royal  progress  ;  herded  outside 
the  town  while  within  it  every  door  was  bolted  and  every 
blind  drawn,  as  though  'twas  indeed  the  funeral  of 
freedom,  I  felt  how  justified  was  Mazzini's  unwillingness 
to  resurrect  under  a  monarchy.  And  when  I  think  of 
the  great  equestrian  monument  to  Victor  Emmanuel  II. 
which  is  to  commemorate  in  1911  the  jubilee  of  the 
dynasty's  sovereignty  over  United  Italy  —  the  monument 
that  will  cost  a  hundred  million  lire,  and  in  the  belly  of 
whose  horse  a  lunch  d'onore  was  recently  offered  by  the 
proprietor  of  the  foundry  to  the  engineers  and  artisans, 
"  twenty-six  persons  in  all "  —  I  see  how  wise  was 
Mazzini's  protest  against  the  narrowing  down  of  a  great 
spiritual  movement  to  the  acquisition  of  more  territory 
by  a  reigning  house.  It  was  a  commercial  traveller  who 
proudly  directed  my  attention  to  this  equine  lunch,  and 
this  standard  of  greatness  just  suits  a  commercial  nation. 
In  this  Gargantuan  horse  the  whole  millennial  dream  of 
Mazzini  may  end,  and  those  young  heroes  of  freedom, 
whose  deaths  lay  so  heavy  on  his  conscience  in  his  black 
moments,  may  have  died  but  to  add  another  to  the  family 


382  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

party  of  monarchs  who  regard  the  rest  of  humanity  as 
a  subject-race,  transferable  from  one  to  the  other  by  con- 
quest or  treaty. 

However  valuable  a  king  may  be  to  Italy  as  a  symbol 
of  Unity,  Mazzini  was  historically  accurate  when  he 
pointed  out  that  the  conception  of  kingship  has  no  roots 
in  Italy,  the  one  epoch  of  imperial  sway  being  a  mere 
degeneration  of  the  Roman  Republic.  It  was  a  fine 
stroke  of  tactics  to  celebrate  Mazzini's  centenary  in  1905 
as  a  national  festival,  in  which  the  King  himself  took 
part.  But  these  centennial  tablets  and  statues  were 
Italy's  way  of  stoning  its  prophet ;  this  festival  was 
Mazzini's  real  funeral,  burying  his  aspirations  out.  of  sight 
so  effectively  that  the  man  in  the  street  has  forgotten  that 
for  Mazzini  the  goal  of  Garibaldi  and  Cavour  was  only  a 
starting-point,  and  a  popular  British  Encyclopaedia  assures 
us  that  Mazzini  "  lived  to  see  all  his  dreams  realised." 

Not  that  there  is  a  word  to  be  said  against  the  charm- 
ing and  intelligent  young  man  who  presides  over  Italy, 
and  who  has  signalised  himself  among  his  peers  by  found- 
ing an  International  Agricultural  Institute.  But  what  a 
climax  to  the  long  struggle  against  tyranny,  this  meeting 
of  King  and  Czar !  To  be  sure  Italy  had  already  made 
friends  with  Austria  in  the  very  year  after  Garibaldi's 
death  —  "  in  the  interests  of  the  peace  of  Europe." 

Poor  Europe.  They  make  a  spiritual  desert  and  call 
it  peace. 

"  Songs  before  Sunrise  "  —  yes,  but  where  is  the  sun  ? 


More  instinct  with  vitality  than  the  most  eloquent 
tablets  to  the  Risorgimento  are  the  mural  inscriptions  of 
hatred  to  Austria  rudely  chalked  up  by  anonymous  hands, 
especially  on  the  Adriatic  side.  "  Down  with  Austria  ! " 
"  Death  to  Austria  !  "  "  Death  to  Trent  and  Trieste  !  "  is 


RISORGIMENTO  383 

the  general  tenor,  varied  by  the  name  of  Francis  Joseph 
scrawled  between  skulls  and  cross-bones.  'Tis  a  strange 
comment  on  the  Triple  Alliance,  and  the  authorities  do 
not  seem  hurried  to  remove  this  glaring  contradiction. 
Even  "Death  to  the  Czar"  survives  the  royal  meeting. 

But  the  Irredenta  is  not  to  be  taken  seriously.  Not 
along  political  lines  does  the  Risorgimento  proceed,  any 
more  than  along  the  moral  lines  for  which  Mazzini  worked. 
The  second  phase,  the  second  Risorgimento  it  may  indeed 
be  called,  is  the  Industrial  Resurrection.  Resurrection  — 
because  Italy,  whose  Merchant  of  Venice  reminds  us  that 
the  Italian  nobleman  was  always  a  trader,  and  whose 
leading  Florentines  were  Magnificent  Moneylenders,  can 
hardly  be  regarded  as  an  Arcadia  transformed  by  the 
cult  of  the  dollar.  Even  Mazzini  demanded  revival  of 
"  the  old  commercial  greatness  "  ;  perhaps  he  might  have 
been  content  to  wait  patiently  through  this  materialistic 
epoch,  if  he  were  sure  it  would  lead  to  a  third  Risorgi- 
mento. 

Hygiene  has  yet  to  penetrate  and  suffuse  the  new  pros- 
perity. But  if  even  Perugia  still  stinks  in  places  and 
Foligno  everywhere,  the  country  is  getting  perceptibly 
cleaner,  and  perhaps  godliness  is  next  to  cleanliness.  But 
the  severest  moralist  cannot  grudge  Italy  her  rise  in  wealth 
and  happiness  :  the  poverty  of  the  peasantry,  accentuated 
by  the  extravagant  ambition  of  Italy  to  be  a  Great  Power 
in  tlie  smallest  of  senses,  has  been  terrible.  At  what  a 
cost  has  Italy  achieved  her  first  Dreadnought,  so  perversely 
christened  Dayite  Alighieri  ! 

Beggars  abound  —  blind,  crippled,  or  with  hideous 
growths  —  especially  in  the  South.  Doubtless  the  influx 
of  the  pleasure-pilgrim  has  increased  the  deformity  of  the 
population,  and  the  Italian  beggar  pushes  forward  his 
monstrosity  as  though  it  were  for  sale,  but  there  is  real 
physical  degeneration  all  the  same.  The  discovery  of 
New  York   and  South  America  by  the  Italian  has  fortu- 


384  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

nately  co-operated  with  the  discovery  of  Italy  by  the 
pleasure-pilgrim  and  the  foreign  investor,  and  some 
600,000  Italians  in  the  South  of  Brazil  provide  the  makings 
of  a  Trans-atlantic  Italy.  Even  the  semi-savage  villages 
of  Sicily  are  sown  with  steamer  advertisements,  and  batches 
going  and  returning  for  jobs  or  harvests  make  an  ever- 
weaving  shuttle  across  the  Atlantic. 

And  if  the  monuments  of  the  First  Risorgimento  clash 
with  the  old  historic  background  of  Italy,  still  more  is  the 
Second  Risorgimento  in  discord  with  it.  One  almost  sees 
a  new  Italy,  infinitely  less  beautiful  but  not  devoid  of 
backbone,  struggling  out  of  the  old  architectural  shell 
which  does  not  in  the  least  express  it.  The  old  ducal  and 
seignorial  cities,  the  old  republics,  are  developing  suburbs, 
sometimes  prosperous  if  prosaic,  like  the  new  quarters  of 
Florence  and  Parma  ;  sometimes  grotesque,  like  Pesaro's 
sea-side  resort,  with  its  "  new  "  architecture — lobster-red 
and  mustard-green  lattices,  and  sham  golden  doors, 
carved  with  busts  ;  sometimes  hideous,  like  the  outskirts 
of  Verona,  where  under  the  blue,  brooding  mountains 
rises  a  quarter  of  electrical  workshops  and  chemical  fac- 
tories. Ancient  towered  Asti  grows  sparkling  with  its  new 
brick  Banca  dTtalia,  and  its  blued  and  gilded  capitals  in 
the  Church  of  S,  Secondo  Martire.  Look  down  on  Genoa, 
with  its  fantasia  of  spires,  campaniles,  roof-gardens,  green 
lattices,  marble  balconies,  chimneys  decorated  with  figures 
of  doges  and  opening  out  like  flowers,  and  see  how  the 
old  narrow  alleys  are  almost  roofed  with  telegraph  and 
telephone  wires.  Go  down  to  the  widened  harbour  and 
see  the  warehouses,  the  American  sky-scrapers,  the  smok- 
ing chimneys,  the  great  steamers  sailing  out  for  Buenos 
Ayres  and  New  York,  the  emigrants  with  their  bundles. 
The  blue  bird  sings  here  no  more  ;  you  hear  only  the 
bang  of  the  hammer,  which  Young  Italy  declares  is  the 
voice  of  the  century. 

I  look  out  of  my  window  at  Forli  (in  the  Via  Garibaldi !) 


RISORGIMENTO  385 

and  see  a  white  minaret  and  a  white  campanile  gleaming 
fantastically  in  the  moonlight  over  a  panorama  of  russet 
roofs.  There  is  a  stone  floor  in  my  bedroom  and  no 
chimney.  In  the  Piazza  all  is  heavy  and  mediteval  :  dull 
stone  colonnades  and  a  rough  cobbled  road.  In  a  church 
a  grotesque  griffin  ramps  over  a  pavement  tomb.  Yet 
through  these  cumbersome  stone  forms  I  feel  the  new  Italy 
struggling.  The  Ginnasio  Communale  of  the  town  shelters 
with  equal  pomp  and  spaciousness  the  picture-gallery  and 
the  chemical  laboratory.  These  colonnades  and  cobbles 
have  no  more  congruity  with  the  new  spirit  than  the  old 
seignorial  and  episcopal  Palazzi  with  the  poor  "  tenement 
families "  whom  they  house  to-day.  Presently  life  will 
slough  off  these  forms  altogether.  Where  an  old  castle 
like  that  of  Ferrara  or  an  old  palace  like  that  of  Lucca  or 
Pistoja  can  be  tamed  to  civic  uses,  it  becomes  a  town-hall ; 
where  no  old  building  is  available,  an  adequate  modern 
form  is  created  as  in  the  handsome  post-offices  with  their 
almost  military  sense  of  the  dignity  of  the  common  life. 

At  Pesaro  I  lodged  in  a  Bishop's  Palace  with  "  steam- 
heat,  telephone,  electric  light  in  all  the  chambers,  garage 
for  automobiles,  motor  omnibus  to  all  the  trains  !  "  Pala- 
tial was  it  indeed,  so  absurdly  spacious  that  the  dining- 
room  Avas  only  accessible  through  vast,  empty,  domed  and 
frescoed  halls,  and  I  could  have  held  a  political  meeting 
in  my  bedroom,  where  I  slept  with  a  sense  of  camping  out 
under  the  infinities.  I  had  no  notion  that  provincial 
Churchmen  were  thus  magnificent,  and  I  do  not  wonder 
that  the  Lord  Cardinal  of  Ostia,  when  he  saw  how  the 
Franciscans  of  the  Portiuncula  slept  on  ragged  mattresses 
and  straw,  without  pillows  or  bedsteads,  burst  into  tears, 
exclaiming :  "  We  wretches  use  so  many  unnecessary 
things  !  "  And  yet  the  Cardinal  did  not  use  a  single 
thing  advertised  by  the  ex-Palace  of  Pesaro. 

Nowhere  do  new  and  old  clash  or  combine  more  disa- 
greeably than  in  Modena,  where  crumbling  marble-pillared 
2o 


386  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

colonnades  are  painted  red,  and  meet  continuations  in 
new  brick.  The  Cathedral,  begun  in  1099,  guarded  and 
flanked  by  quaint  stone  lions,  bears  on  its  ancient  cam- 
panile a  tablet  to  Victor  Emmanuel.  In  the  great  Piazza, 
church,  picture-gallery  and  war-monument  swear  at  one 
another.  The  Ducal  Palace  is  a  military  school,  the  moat 
round  the  old  rampart  —  where  once  resounded  that 
archaic  song  of  the  war-sentinels — is  a  public  laundry. 

And  the  statues,  tablets,  monuments,  of  the  Second 
Risorgimento  begin  to  vie  with  those  of  the  first.  Pro 
Nervi^  painted  on  the  benches  on  that  desolate  cactus- 
grown  shore,  among  the  Leonardesque  sea-sprayed  rocks 
by  the  old  Gropallo  tower,  attests  the  activity  of  a.  society 
created  to  boom  the  summer  resort,  while  a  tablet  cele- 
brates the  Marchese  who,  foreseeing  the  future  of  Nervi, 
put  up  the  first  hotel  and  died  with  the  name  of  the 
municipality  on  his  lips.  I  do  not  think  the  Marchese 
himself  foresaw  how  far  Nervi  would  go.  I  know  I  walked 
miles  along  its  tramway  amid  monotonous  streets,  with  no 
sign  of  an  end.     Indeed  the  tram-line  reaches  Genoa. 

Nor  is  the  Marchese  the  only  hero  of  the  Second  Risorgi- 
mento. Trust  Carrara  for  that  —  Carrara  and  Guglielmo 
Walton  ! 

And  the  creations  of  this  Risorgimento  rival  those  of 
the  Renaissance  in  costliness.  Where  in  all  Europe  will 
you  find  a  street  as  luxurious  as  Genoa's  Via  XX  Set- 
tembre  —  the  long  colonnade,  the  granite  2:)illars,  the  gilded 
and  frescoed  roof,  the  mosaic  pavement  where  the  poorest 
may  tread  more  magnificently  than  Agamemnon. 

And  the  great  Gallery  of  Victor  Emmanuel  in  Milan, 
what  is  it  but  a  secular  parody  of  the  Cathedral  it  faces 
—  nave,  transept,  dome,  complete  even  to  the  invisible 
frescoes,  a  CathSdrale  de  luxe?  Very  sad  and  solemn 
looked  the  old  Cathedral  at  night,  for  all  its  faery  fretwork, 
as  Life  passed  it  by  for  its  glittering  counterpart. 


RISORGIMENTO  387 

VI 

I  went  to  San  Marino  to  get  away  from  Garibaldi.  For 
here  —  I  said  to  myself  —  is  the  one  spot  in  Italy  that  is 
not  Italy,  that  has  kept  its  pristine  Republicanism.  Here 
on  the  Titan  Mount  is  the  one  spot  that  cannot  possibly 
acclaim  the  Union.  At  most  I  may  encounter  a  memorial 
to  Mazzini. 

I  left  Rimini  by  the  Gate  of  the  Via  Garibaldi  which 
leads  straight  to  San  Marino,  and  trudging  for  the  better 
part  of  a  day  I  saw  it  impending  horribly  some  two  thou- 
sand five  hundred  feet  above  me,  and  after  dragging  my- 
self through  the  Borgo  or  lower  suburb,  I  toiled  in  the 
darkness  up  a  narrow,  steep,  slippery,  jagged  path,  on  the 
brink  of  a  sheer  precipice,  into — the  Via  Garibaldi!  And 
in  a  bedroom  looking  down  on  it  —  for  the  only  hotel  is 
in  a  Piazzetta  abutting  on  it  —  I  passed  the  night. 

In  the  morning  I  found  a  Garibaldi  garden  and  a  Gaffe 
Garibaldi  and  a  Piazza  Garibaldi  and  a  Garibaldi  bust  and 
a  Garibaldi  bas-relief  and  two  Garibaldi  tablets;  item,  a 
tablet  to  Victor  Emmanuel  and  a  centennial  tablet  and 
street  to  Mazzini,  even  a  Via  of  Giosue  Carducci,  the 
laureate  of  the  Risorgimento. 

Part  of  the  explanation  is  that  Garibaldi  sought  refuge 
here  in  1849,  escaping  from  "  the  Roman  Republic  "  to 
the  Ravenna  pine-wood  where  poor  Anita  died,  and  his 
order  for  the  day  —  "  Soldiers,  we  are  on  a  Soil  of  Refuge," 
and  his  letter  of  thanks  from  Caprera  —  "  I  go  away  proud 
to  be  a  citizen  of  so  virtuous  a  Republic  "  —  are  reproduced 
on  the  tablets.  But  the  deeper  cause  of  this  sympathy  is 
that  San  Marino  is  Italian  through  and  through,  and  its 
hoary  independence,  real  enough  in  the  days  of  the  city 
states,  is  become  a  farce  solemnly  played  with  separate 
postage  stamps  and  currency,  Regents,  Councils,  militia, 
peers,  commons,  Home  and  Foreign  Secretaries,  ribbons, 
orders,  treaties,  extradition  treaties  and  a  diplomatic  corps 


388  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

in  England,  Austria-Hungary,  Spain,  France  and  Italy,  all 
to  cover  its  budget  of  .£11,000  and  its  population  of  10,422 
souls,  enumerated  from  week  to  week  in  the  toy  press  and 
decreasing  by  dozens.  'Tis  a  game  into  which  all  Europe 
has  entered  in  high  good  humour,  the  grand  fargeur^ 
Napoleon,  even  proposing  to  extend  the  Republic's  boun- 
daries, which  comprise  only  thirty-three  square  miles.  But 
the  Sammarinese  had  sense  enough  to  see  that  a  greater 
realm  would  be  treated  more  seriously.  Mount  Titan,  as 
the  seat  not  of  a  toy  capital  but  of  something  answering 
less  humorously  to  its  name,  would  cease  to  be  a  joke, 
whereas  a  State  less  than  one-fourth  of  the  Isle  of  Wight 
might  remain  for  Europe  a  blessed  land  of  diversion  from 
the  eternal  earnestness  of  the  sword,  might  even  save 
Europe's  self-respect  as  a  region  of  civilisation,  regardful 
of  treaties  and  ancient  rights.  So  serious  in  fact  did  the 
Sammarinese  consider  the  danger  of  being  taken  seri- 
ously, that  Antonio  Onofri  who  advised  against  this  Na- 
poleonic inflation  stands  immortalised  as  Pater  Patriae. 

No  doubt  the  inaccessibility  of  Mount  Titan  must  have 
been  the  origin  of  San  Marino's  existence  in  those  dim  days 
of  the  Diocletian  persecution,  when  the  Roman  Matron, 
Felicita,  whom  the  stone-cutter  Marinus  had  converted  to 
Christianity,  "  made  him  a  present  of  the  mountain."  And 
the  same  inaccessibility  which  suited  it  for  a  Christian 
colony  contributed  later  to  the  success  of  its  traditional 
policy  of  balancing  between  the  Rimini  Malatestas  and 
the  Dukes  of  Urbino.  But  what  prevented  Austria  from 
following  Garibaldi  into  San  Marino?  What  but  its  en- 
joyment of  the  game,  or  its  desperate  clinging  to  that 
shred  of  self-respect?  To-day  when  the  cycle  of  history 
has  brought  us  round  again  to  the  period  of  Ezzelino, 
when  the  intellectual  or  religious  concepts  which  anciently 
veiled  usurpations,  are  contemptuously  thrown  aside,  and 
the  iron  hand  crushes  in  mockery  of  the  combined  Jurists 
of  Europe,  what  stands  between  San  Marino  and  extinction? 


RISORGIMENTO  389 

Only  the  environing  Italy.  And  Italy  plays  with  the 
tiny  Republic  as  a  father  plays  with  a  child.  San  Marino 
has  two  mortars  in  the  fortress  of  La  Rocca  —  for  what  is 
a  State  without  artillery  to  fire  on  solemn  occasions?  — 
and  these  mortars  were  presented  by  Victor  Emmanuel  III. 
Italy  also  receives  the  more  desperate  criminals,  who  are 
boarded  out  in  its  prisons,  as  it  supplies  the  police  from 
its  reserve  soldiers,  and  the  Judge  from  its  lawyers.  Italy 
has  provided  its  only  distinguished  citizens  —  they  are 
honorary,  —  its  national  hymn  was  taken  from  Guido  of 
Arezzo,  the  inventor  of  the  musical  scale,  and  when  the 
beautiful  if  mimetic  Palazzo  Pubblico  for  the  Regents  and 
the  Council  was  opened  in  1894,  it  was  with  a  speech  of 
Carducci. 

Yet  "  Liberty,"  I  found,  was  the  keynote  of  San  Marino. 
Liberty  was  the  motto  of  its  arms,  with  their  three  mountains 
and  plumed  towers.  Liberty  waved  in  the  white  and  blue 
flag  and  was  painted  on  the  shields  of  the  palace  corridors. 
S.  Marino,  the  author  of  Liberty,  was  commemorated  in 
the  cathedral  fagade  with  its  flourish  of  Sen.  P.  Q.,  and 
Liberty  cried  from  the  scroll  his  statue  flourished.  "  In 
tuenda  Libertate  vigilis  "  warned  the  inscription  over  the 
court  room ;  "  animus  in  consulendo  Liber "  counselled 
the  medallion  near  the  tribune,  and  in  choice  Latin  epi- 
graphs the  transient  tyrant,  Caesar  Borgia,  impugner  of 
Liberty,  was  denounced  and  derided.  Sublime  it  was  to 
stand  before  the  Gothic  Palace  of  the  Regents,  on  this 
dizzy  Piazza  della  Liberta  with  its  gigantic  statue  of 
Liberty  (her  hand  on  her  bannered  spear),  and  to  behold 
the  sheer  abyss  below,  and  as  from  an  aeroplane  the  mar- 
vellous panorama  of  sea  and  mountain  around,  Liberty 
written  in  every  rugged  convolution  and  glacial  peak,  and 
shimmering  in  every  masterless  wave.  And  yet  my  imagi- 
nation refused  to  play  the  game ;  refused  to  take  with  be- 
coming reverence  the  crowned  and  gilded  pew  of  the 
Regents,  the   historic  frescoes  and  friezes,  the  blue  and 


390  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

orange  of  the  "  Guarda  Nobile,"  the  kepis  and  bayonets 
of  the  militia,  the  red  facings  of  the  police.  All  this 
parade  of  "  Libertas "  was  in  inverse  proportion  to  the 
substance,  or  even  to  the  power  of  securing  it.  The  Re- 
public appeared  like  a  banknote  without  gold  behind  it, 
and  an  Italian  banknote  at  that ;  never  so  essentially 
Italian  as  in  the  lapidary  literature  asserting  its  separato- 
ness.  This  grand  Palace,  this  costly  Cathedral,  both  built 
only  within  the  last  few  years  simultaneously  with  the 
motor  road  that  has  destroyed  the  last  semblance  of  isola- 
tion, seemed  like  that  spasm  of  self-assertiveness  which 
so  often  precedes  extinction.  And  I  thought  that  con- 
quering nations  might  well  mark  how  easily  love  can  melt 
what  hate  would  only  harden.  Imagine  if  Italy  had 
brought  her  mortars  against  San  Marino  instead  of  pre- 
senting them  to  it,  or  if  she  had  made  a  road  for  her 
mortars  instead  of  for  her  motors. 

But  as  an  antique  curio  San  Marino  is  delightful.  I 
love  to  muse  on  the  pomp  of  its  Regents  who  are  elected 
—  like  the  Doges  of  Venice  —  by  a  mixture  of  choice  and 
chance,  and  go  in  state  to  celebrate  Mass,  clothed  in  satin 
breeches  and  velvet  mantle,  in  doublet  and  sword  and 
ermined  cap,  accompanied  by  the  Noble  Guard  and  the 
high  officers  of  State,  and  then  from  the  Cathedral,  still 
to  the  clashing  of  church  bells  and  the  strains  of  military 
music,  to  their  semestral  thrones  in  the  Palazzo  Pubblico  ; 
there  to  hear  a  speech  from  the  Government  Orator  — 
whose  fee  is  four  shillings  —  and  to  take  tlie  Latin  oath 
not  to  tamper  with  the  Libertas  of  the  Constitution,  and  to 
receive  the  State  seals  and  keys  and  the  insignia  of  Grand 
INIasters  of  the  Order  of  San  Marino,  perhaps  even  the  first 
instalment  of  the  royal  budget  of  a  pound  a  month. 

No  autocrats  are  these  Regents,  despite  their  regal 
salary.  They  are  mere  constitutional  monarchs,  official 
headpieces  to  the  Arringo  or  sovereign  Council  in  which 
the   real   power   resides.     But    though   Republican,   San 


RISORGIMENTO  391 

Marino  is  not  Democratic,  for  the  Arringo  fills  up  its 
vacancies  by  option.  Liberty  is  not  flouted,  however,  for 
may  not  every  head  of  a  family  —  after  the  half-yearly 
elections  —  give  the  Arringo  a  piece  of  his  mind?  Time 
was  when  the  citizen  could  stroll  into  its  sittings  and 
tender  it  the  benefit  of  his  advice,  but  this  form  of  Liberty 
seems  to  have  been  found  too  excessive  and  cumbersome 
even  for  the  land  of  Libertas. 

Happy  are  the  nations  that  have  no  history,  and  San 
Marino  seems  to  have  escaped  almost  without  an  anecdote. 
In  1461  Pope  Pius  II.  invited  it  to  make  war  with  the 
Magnificent  Monster,  Sigismondo  Malatesta  of  Rimini, 
and  rewarded  its  aid  with  four  castles.  Caesar  Borgia 
came  and  went  in  1503,  a  nocturnal  attack  by  Fabiano  del 
Monte  was  repulsed  in  1543,  and  after  that  nothing  ap- 
pears to  have  happened  till  1739,  when  the  Cardinal  Leg- 
ate, Giulio  Alberoni,  occupied  the  Republic.  But  the 
Republic  having  appealed  to  the  Pope  was  left  free  again, 
Clement  XII.  thus  becoming  a  national  hero  with  his  bust 
in  the  Palazzo.  But  national  heroes  of  its  own  it  has  none. 
It  has  adopted  the  cult  of  Garibaldi,  though  he  preaches 
Italian  Unity,  and  made  honorary  citizens  of  Canova,  Ros- 
sini and  Verdi,  and  it  has  almost  appropriated  the  famous 
numismatist,  Bartolommeo  Borghesi,  who  did  at  least  live 
here,  if  he  omitted  to  be  born  here,  and  who  dominates 
one  of  the  wonderful  mountain-terraces,  holding  a  book 
and  gazing  carefully  at  the  only  point  where  there  is  no 
view.  But  as  to  the  "  Viri  Clarissimi  et  Illustres  Castri 
Sancti  Marini "  blazoned  on  the  Palazzo  staircase,  between 
shields  of  "  Libertas,"  I  fear  their  celebrity  had  not  reached 
me.  Doctors,  artists,  counts,  dignitaries  of  the  Church  — 
I  was  impartially  ignorant  of  them  all. 

What  is  to  account  for  this  paucity  of  personalities? 
Had  a  great  saint  or  a  great  poet  arisen  here,  we  should 
have  explained  it  glibly  by  the  pious  isolation  among  the 
eternal  mountains,  looking  down  upon  the  eternal  sea, 


392  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

under  the  everlasting  stars.  Had  a  new  Acropolis  or  a 
new  Parthenon  risen  on  this  hill  of  the  Titan,  we  should 
not  have  lacked  proofs  of  the  inevitability  of  the  new 
Athens.  But  nothing  has  arisen.  Giambittisti  Belluzzi, 
the  military  architect  of  its  walls  and  of  the  Imperial  Castle 
at  Pesaro,  is  San  Marino's  highest  name  in  art,  while  in 
literature  its  chroniclers  point  to  Canon  Ignazio  Belzoppi, 
"  letterato  di  molta  fama,"  born  in  1762,  author  of  the 
heroi-comic  poem,  "  II  Bertuccino  "  (The  Little  Monkey) 
—  unpublished! 

For  life  to  be  perfect  then,  small  circles  are  not  enough, 
pace  my  friend  Boethius.  They  must  tingle  with  life, 
perhaps  even  with  death.  Can  it  be  that  the  advocatus 
diaboli  was  right,  and  that  the  snug  security  of  a  diplomatic 
mountain-fastness  has  bred  mediocrity  ?  I  tell  him  angrily 
that  the  place  is  a  Paradise  and  he  answers  calmly  that  it 
is  only  a  Parish.  Can  it  be  that  the  only  Paradise  pos- 
sible is  a  Fools'  Paradise  ? 

But  a  serpent  has  entered  Eden,  crawling  probably  by 
the  motor-car  road.  He  has  insinuated  doubt  of  holy  au- 
thority and  the  Samraarinese  begin  to  eat  of  the  Tree  of 
Knowledge.  11  Titano  is  the  organ  of  the  Socialists  —  a 
Titan  in  revolt  —  and  the  Somarino  serves  the  Clericals — 
with  the  accent  on  the  Santo.  "Preti  !  !  !  "  is  the  ejacu- 
latory  title  of  an  article  in  the  number  of  II  Titano  that 
came  into  my  hands  (April  24,1910).  "We  might  say 
impostors,  falsifiers,  canaille^''''  it  begins  pleasantly,  "but 
we  say  instead  'Priests,'  which  is  a  substantive  that  com- 
prises all  the  others." 

And  thus  across  its  precipices  San  Marino  joins  hands 
with  "  Young  Italy,"  whose  programme  according  to  the 
organ  of  that  name  embraces  the  exiling  of  the  Vatican 
beyond  the  frontiers  of  Italy,  the  sweeping  away  of  the 
bankrupt  remains  of  Christianity,  and  the  abandonment  of 
Imperialism  and  the  African  adventure.  I  will  engage 
there  are  even  Futurists  in  San  Marino. 


RISORGIMENTO  393 

VII 

I  must  confess  to  a  smiling  sympathy  with  this  "  Young- 
est Italy "  party  —  if  the  little  half-baked  literary  and 
artistic  clique  of  Futurists  can  be  called  a  party.  I  can 
understand  the  oppression  of  all  the  glorious  Italian  past,  all 
those  massive  buildings  and  masterpieces,  and  stereotyped 
forms  of  thought.  Like  the  son  of  a  genius,  modern  Italy 
is  cramped  and  overshadowed.  Hence  the  rabid  yearning 
for  some  new  form  of  energising,  this  glorification  of  the 
moment  and  perpetual  change.  In  a  fantastic  fury  of 
iconoclasm  the  Futurists  demand  even  the  destruction  of 
the  creations  of  ancient  genius  that  overhang  their  lives 
— they  would  make  an  art-pyre  as  fervently  as  Savona- 
rola. Climbing  the  Clock  Tower  of  St.  Mark's  Square, 
they  threw  down  coloured  hand  bills  repudiating  the  vulgar 
voluptuous  Venice  of  the  tourist.  "  Hasten  to  fill  its  fetid 
little  canals  with  the  ruins  of  its  tumbling  and  leprous 
palaces.  Burn  the  gondolas,  those  see-saws  for  fools !  " 
So  far  so  good.  But  mark  the  beatific  vision  that  is  to 
replace  this  putrefying  beauty.  "  Raise  to  the  sky  the 
rigid  geometry  of  large  metallic  bridges,  and  manufac- 
tories with  waving  hair  of  smoke.  Abolish  everywhere 
the  languishing  curves  of  the  old  architectures."  How 
characteristic  of  the  Second  Risorgimento  !  It  must  bo 
by  an  oversight  that  the  smoke  is  still  permitted  to  be 
"  waving."  I  imagine  that  the  resurrection  of  the  old 
Campanile  of  Venice  must  have  been  the  last  straw.  For 
ten  hundred  and  fourteen  years  this  gloomy  old  tower  had 
impended,  and  when  it  did  at  last  fall  of  its  own  sheer 
decrepitude,  lo  !  it  must  be  stood  up  again,  exact  to  the 
last  massy  inch,  and  even  with  the  same  inscription — • 
"  Verbum  caro  factum  est''  —  on  its  bells.  As  if  a  bell  could 
have  no  new  message  after  a  millennium  !  Let  the  his- 
torian, at  any  rate,  mark  that  the  Futurists  did  not  rise 
till  the  Campanile  was  not  allowed  to  fall.     The  police, 


394  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

taking  the  Futurists  seriously,  prohibit  their  meetings, 
which  will  end  in  making  them  take  themselves  seriously. 
But  the}''  are  a  useful  counteractive  to  the  Zealots  of  the 
Zona  Monumentale,  who,  in  their  passion  for  the  ruins  of 
Rome,  forget  the  claims  of  life.  When  the  Present  says, 
"  I  must  live,"  the  artist  and  the  archaeologist  too  often 
reply  :  "  Je  rCen  vois  pas  la  necessite."  Carducci  even 
called  on  Fever  to  guard  the  Appian  Way.  But  cities 
exist  for  citizens,  not  for  spectators,  and  when  the  tele- 
phone bell  of  the  Present  rings,  we  should  reply  like  the 
Italian  waiter:  ^'•Pronto!  Desideraf''  We  cannot  do  in 
Rome  as  the  Romans  do,  for  they  have  to  live,  not  look  at 
Ruins.  And  let  us  not  expect  the  Romans  to  do  in  Rome 
as  we  do.  If  tramways  must  run  along  the  Via  Appia,  at 
least  Fever  will  retire  before  them.  How  long  is  it  our 
duty  to  guard  the  ruins  of  the  Past  ?  Suppose  the  tombs 
and  temples  of  the  Appian  Way  should  threaten  to  col- 
lapse altogether,  have  we  to  keep  them  in  a  state  of  arti- 
ficial ruin  ?  Augustus  boasted  that  he  found  Rome  brick 
and  made  it  marble.  If  the  industrial  Risorgimento  found 
Rome  marble  and  made  it  brick,  I  suppose  there  are  com- 
pensations for  Augustus.  Imperial  Rome  never  thought 
of  dedicating  a  slab  of  that  marble  to  the  nameless  pauper 
dead,  worn  out  in  the  obscure  service  of  their  country,  as 
Industrial  Rome  has  done  in  a  touching  inscription.  And 
should  Rome  extend  the  tale  of  its  bricks  to  house  the 
homeless  troglodytes  who  pig  in  the  remains  of  that  ancient 
marble,  I  will  throw  up  my  cap  with  the  Futurists. 

Pisa  is  to  me  a  dream-city,  but  to  the  Pisans  it  is 
a  centre  of  the  glass  industry  and  the  cloth  industry, 
with  municipalised  gas.  They  have  done  handsomely 
in  leaving  me  my  dream-city  outside  the  town  life. 
If  topographical  obstacles  prevent  other  ancient  cities 
from  thus  surviving  themselves,  let  me  be  thankful  for 
small  mercies.  There  was  one  old  inn  at  Perugia 
which  had  escaped  the  electric  light  and  the  pleasure- 


RISORGIMENTO  395 

pilgrims,  and  where  the  porter  peeled  the  potatoes,  but 
as  I  sat  this  very  Spring,  dining  in  the  quaint  court- 
yard, lo  !  to  my  chagrin  the  light  of  modernity  flooded 
it  for  the  first  time.  But  there  chanced  too  that  night 
so  joyous  a  band  of  University  students,  on  gymnastic 
business  bent,  the  old  courtyard  resounded  with  such 
pranks,  and  songs,  and  cheers,  such  fulness  of  young 
new  life,  that  I  felt  Perugia  could  not  for  ever  live  on 
griffins  and  Peruginos  and  Baglioni  horrors.  In  that 
moment  even  the  joyous  madness  of  the  Futurists  ap- 
peared to  me  saner  than  the  gloom  of  a  Gissing  con- 
cluding his  Italian  journeys  "By  the  Ionian  Sea"  with 
the  wish  that  he  could  live  for  ever  in  the  Past,  the 
Present  and  its  interests  blotted  out. 

It  is  a  cheap  aesthetic  to  retire  to  the  Past,  too 
blind  to  see  beauty  in  the  Present,  and  too  ancemic  to 
build  it  for  the  Future.  But  humanity  is  not  a 
museum-curator;  the  cult  of  ancestors,  once  the  back- 
bone of  Hindu-Aryan  civilisation,  survives  only  in  China. 
The  cult  of  descendants  has  taken  its  place,  the  Golden 
Age  is  before,  not  behind,  and  the  debt  we  owe  to  our 
fathers  we  pay  to  our  sons,  not  necessarily  in  the  same 
currency.  No  doubt  the  Past  is  ivy-clad,  the  Present 
raw  and  the  Future  dim.  But  as  happiness  does  not 
come  from  the  search  for  happiness,  neither  does  beauty 
come  from  the  search  for  beauty.  "Rather  seek  ye  the 
Kingdom  of  God  and  all  these  things  shall  be  added 
unto  you." 

VIII 

So  despite  the  slow  black  cigar,  the  ubiquitous  farmacia 
and  pasticceria,  despite  the  pervasive  petrifaction  of 
past  glory,  I  feel  that  a  vigorous  breeze  of  young  thought 
moves  through  Italy,  and  that  Mazzini  is  not  entirely 
swallowed  up  in  tlie  belly  of  the  Great  Horse.  "-11 
nuUismo'"  was  an  Asti  election-poster's  shrewd  summary 
of   the  programme  of  the   Clerical   Moderates,  ''lo   star 


396  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

quieti — forma  ipocrita  di  reazione.^^  If  Italy  escapes  the 
reaction  involved  in  standing  still,  we  may  yet  see  a  Third 
Risorgimento  that  will  resurrect  Mazzini.  Even  a  Repub- 
lican Congress  has  met  freely,  if  with  closed  doors. 

The  popular  Italian  newspapers,  like  the  windows  of 
the  bookshops,  are  far  more  intellectual  than  our  own, 
and  there  is  a  healthy  readiness  to  try  social  experi- 
ments under  the  popular  referendum.  If  the  nation- 
alisation of  the  railways  does  not  yet  pay,  on  account 
of  the  multiplicity  of  officials,  it  has  at  least  provided 
a  more  punctual  service  than  of  yore,  and  the  third- 
class  passenger  is  treated  as  a  human  being.  A  Jew 
as  Premier  and  another  as  Syndic  of  Rome  constitute 
an  amende  honorable  for  the  Italy  which  established 
the  Ghetto  and,  cramping  a  prolific  race,  produced  in 
Venice  the  first  specimen  of  the  American  sky-scraper. 
Capital  punishment  is  abolished — the  apostle,  Beccaria, 
duly  petrified  at  Milan  —  and  despite  the  legend  of  the 
stiletto  and  the  vendetta  nobody  demands  its  restora- 
tion. Phlebotomy  prevails  alarmingly,  through  the  habit 
of  using  a  knife  as  if  it  were  the  mere  point  of  the  fist, 
but  it  is  a  peaceable  and  polite  people.  The  niente 
with  which  the  veriest  vagabond  deprecates  your  thanks, 
the  prego  of  the  courtlier  defence  against  gratitude,  are  the 
outer  and  audible  sign  of  an  inner  gentleness.  Irritatingly 
vague  as  regards  time  and  space  and  money,  a  foe  to 
definite  agreements,  a  lover  of  the  horizon  and  the 
huona  mano,  running  restaurants  Math  unpriced  menus, 
and  shops  with  unmarked  goods,  the  Italian  has  always 
the  saving  grace  of  respect  for  things  of  the  mind.  Who 
ever  saw  a  picture  of  Tennyson  labelled  —  like  the 
photographs  of  Carducci  — "  Mighty  Master,  Sublime 
Poet,  Refulgent  National  Glory  ! "  There  are  moods  in 
which  I  could  applaud  even  the  stones. 

But  it  is  the  revolt  against  Rome  which  stirs  most  furi- 
ously the  intelligenza  of  Italy  —  as  of  all  the  Latin  world. 


RISORGIMENTO  397 

While  in  England  the  fight  against  Christianity  is  con- 
lined  to  a  few  guerilla  papers  in  low  esteem,  in  Italy  it  is 
a  pitched  battle.  And  the  modern  Anti-Pope  is  far  more 
formidable  to  the  Vatican  than  the  mediaeval,  being  a 
rival  idea,  not  a  rival  man.  The  Vatican  handicaps  itself 
superfluously  by  sneering  at  the  Risorgimento  —  though 
I  am  told  its  haughty  refusal  to  recognise  the  Unity  of 
Italy  brings  in  shekels  from  Mexico,  Colombia  and  other 
strongholds  of  the  spirit.  Instead  of  joining  in  the  recent 
Garibaldi  jubilation,  it  asked  through  its  organ  whether 
the  prosperity  of  the  South  had  not  been  sacrificed  to  the 
interests  of  the  North.  And  so  far  from  making  conces- 
sions to  Modernism,  it  is  sitting  tighter  than  ever,  issuing 
lamentable  Syllabuses  and  Encyclicals,  accumulating  lists 
of  suspects.  It  censured  Minocchi  for  allegorising  the 
first  three  chapters  of  Genesis,  and  excommunicated  Murri 
for  saying  the  Pope  ought  not  to  play  at  politics.  The 
freethinkers  complain  uneasily  of  its  aggressiveness, 
lamenting  —  with  unconscious  humour  —  that  it  makes 
propaganda!  The  army  itself — ay,  even  the  old  Gari- 
baldians  —  are  not  safe  from  its  guiles  !  As  if  the  Con- 
gregation of  the  Propaganda  were  of  to-day  I 

But  the  confiscation  of  monasteries  and  churches  to 
military  and  civil  uses  —  to  barracks,  agricultural  colleges, 
gymnasia,  hospitals,  what-not  —  the  transformation  of 
elaborate  historic  shrines  into  State  Monuments,  are  indi- 
cations of  the  ground  lost  to  the  Church  in  its  own 
peculiar  land.  Strange  was  it  to  see  squads  of  half -nude 
lads  at  gymnastics  in  the  old  Renaissance  church  of  St. 
Mary  Magdalen  at  Pesaro.  Still  more  surprising  to  see  a 
carpenter  sawing  away  in  the  lofty,  well-preserved  Church 
of  the  Jesuits  in  Pavia,  his  wood  stacked  in  the  forsaken 
frescoed  chapels,  as  in  a  strange  return  of  Christendom  to 
its  origins,  or  an  illustration  of  the  new  Logion^  "  Cleave 
the  wood  and  ye  shall  find  me."  I  bought  coal  at  a  still 
more  decayed  church,  taking  off  my  hat  involuntarily. 


398  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

The  journalism  of  the  street-nomenclature  keeps  pace 
with  the  progress  of  anti-Clericalism.  "  Sons  of  an  age 
which  you  foresaw,"  the  epitaph  on  Giordano  Bruno's 
tomb  assures  that  victim  of  the  Inquisition,  and  many  a 
Via  or  Piazza  Giordano  Bruno  in  places  apparently  re- 
mote from  the  currents  of  thouglit  —  Pesaro,  Perugia, 
Foligno,  Urbino  on  its  isolated  rock  —  testifies  that  even 
a  tombstone  may  speak  the  truth,  provided  that  it  is 
only  posthumous  enough.  Urbino  indeed,  lonely  rugged 
Urbino,  is  compelled  to  put  up  in  the  Church  of  S. 
Francesco  the  significant  warning :  "  The  law  punishes 
disturbers  of  religious  functions."  And  even  more  illu- 
minating than  the  Giordano  Bruno  streets  or  the  Giordano 
Bruno  societies  is  the  mushroom  rapidity  with  which 
streets  of  Francesco  Ferrer  have  sprung  up  all  over  Italy. 
Florence,  with  biting  sarcasm,  has  made  its  Via  Francesco 
Ferrer  out  of  its  Archbishop  Street.  Tiny  San  Gimi- 
gnano  of  the  many  towers  has  inserted  a  tablet  to  Ferrer 
in  the  wall  of  an  open  loggia  of  a  theatre,  "  in  order  that 
Thought  should  be  fruitful  and  survive  Death."  .  .  . 
"Victim,"  it  cries,  "of  the  sacerdotal  tyranny,  inaugurat- 
ing the  not  distant  time  when  there  shall  be  neither 
oppressed  nor  oppressors  !  " 

Such  millennial  dreams  in  such  mediaeval  cities  prove 
that  Mazzini  was  no  sport  of  nature,  but  a  true  son  of 
Italy  ;  seed-plot  of  all  the  mysticisms  and  aspirations  from 
St.  Francis  and  Dante  to  Gioberti  and  David  Lazzaretti. 

IX 

"  Rome  of  the  C^sars  gave  the  Unity  of  Civilisation 
that  force  imposed  on  Europe.  Rome  of  the  Popes 
gave  a  Unity  of  Civilisation  that  Authority  imposed  on  a 
great  part  of  the  human  race.  Rome  of  the  People 
will  give,  when  you  Italians  are  nobler  than  you  are  now, 
a  Unity  of  Civilisation  accepted  by  the  free  consent  of  the 


RISORGIMENTO  399 

nations  for  Humanity."  In  this  magnificent  synthesis, 
written  in  1844,  Mazzini  proclaimed  the  mission  of  Rome  to 
the  world.  His  mental  outlook  was  infinitely  broader  than 
Lazzaretti's,  whose  story  is  one  of  Life's  many  plagiarisms 
of  the  Palestinian  original,  complete  even  to  martyr- 
dom and  an  awaited  Resurrection.  Yet  Mazzini  shared 
with  the  peasant-prophet  of  Monte  Amiata  the  assurance  of  a 
not  distant  Millennium  to  be  inaugurated  by  his  followers. 
'Twas  a  blindness  due  to  standing  in  his  own  white  light. 
The  simplest  observation  of  the  facts  reveals  that  humanity 
is  only  at  its  alphabet,  that  we  are  living  in  the  mere 
infancy  of  our  planet's  human  history,  in  a  Dark  Age  to 
which  the  millennial  century  will  look  back  with  incre- 
dulity, though  a  few  Gissings  will  be  anxious  to  live  in  it. 
The  overwhelming  majority  of  mankind  to-day  abides 
religiously  in  primitive  autocosms,  which  have  little  resem- 
blance to  the  cosmos  as  it  is,  and  every  variety  of  savagery 
from  African  cannibalism  to  European  rubber-hunting 
and  American  negro-lynching  is  still  in  vogue.  Half 
the  land  of  the  globe  is  still  in  undisturbed  possession  of 
our  animal  and  insect  inferiors.  Canada,  Australia  and 
South  America  show  a  few  human  figures  dotting  the 
endless  spaces  —  in  Matto  Grosso  in  Brazil  a  hundred 
thousand  people  occupy  half  a  million  square  miles,  in 
Patagonia  each  man  may  have  a  San  Marino  Republic  to 
himself,  in  Alaska  the  population  of  a  small  English 
country  town  is  spread  over  six  hundred  thousand  square 
miles.  Even  the  United  States,  which  are  sixty  times  as 
large  as  England,  have  only  double  its  population.  In 
Asia,  the  cradle  of  so-called  civilisation,  there  are  still 
nomad  populations,  and  large  tracts,  as  of  Arabia  and 
Tibet,  have  never  been  penetrated  by  the  foot  of  an  ex- 
plorer. The  bulk  of  Africa  as  of  Russia — which  is  half 
Europe  j9Zm8  half  Asia  —  is  still  given  over  to  barbarism. 
One  third  of  the  whole  human  race  is  packed  into  China, 
a  land  where  torture  is  still  legal.     Decidedly  there  is 


400  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

plenty  of  scope  for  "  the  mission  of  Rome,"  nor  need  the 
lover  of  the  picturesque  yet  apprehend  the  monotony  of 
the  Millennium,  as,  girdled  by  stars  and  infinities,  crossed 
by  the  tails  of  comets,  rent  and  seamed  by  earthquakes,  our 
planet  continues  its  amazing  adventure. 

X 

But  if  spiritual  Imperialism  has  made  little  progress  in 
the  land  of  Mazzini,  Rome  does  not  lack  its  party  of  mate- 
rial Imperialism,  ever  egging  on  Italy  to  deeds  of  der- 
ringdo  and  to  the  fulfilment  of  its  "  manifest  destiny  "  in 
Tripoli  and  Cyrenaica,  whose  arid  deserts  flow  with  milk 
and  honey  under  the  imperialistic  pen.  More  in  sorrow 
than  in  auger  a  writer  in  the  Trihuna  rebukes  these  hot- 
heads as  merely  literary  :  conquistadors  by  fury  of 
metaphor  and  prosopopoeia,  whereas  real  Imperialism  — 
Francesco  Coppola  perceives  with  envy  —  is  the  irresistible 
instinct  of  an  imperial  race,  whose  expansion  is  uncon- 
scious or  even  anti-conscious,  and  which  is  rich  in  strong 
silent  Kiplingesque  heroes.  Italy,  a  young  nation,  whose 
bones  are  not  yet  set,  whose  teeth  are  not  yet  sprouted,  is 
falling,  he  laments,  into  the  senile  decay  of  socialistic 
rhetoric,  and  pacifical  and  humanitarian  doctrine.  The 
degenerate  Italians  have  pulled  ujj  the  railway  lines  to 
prevent  the  soldiers  going  off  to  the  wars  of  expansion, 
have  made  a  pother  about  "slavery,"  and  have  diverted 
the  world  by  setting  Civil  and  Military  Governors  cock- 
fighting  before  Commissions  of  Inquiry.  "And  then  we 
call  ourselves  the  heirs  of  Rome!  " 

But,  prithee,  good  Signor  Coppola,  is  it  not  enough  to 
be  the  heirs  of  Italy?  Is  it  not  enough  to  inhabit  the 
most  beautiful  land  in  the  world,  the  richest-dyed  in  his- 
toric tints,  the  greatest  breeder  of  great  men,  the  garden 
of  the  arts,  the  temple  of  religion  ?  Is  there  no  such 
thing  as  Intensive  Imperialism  ?     To  produce  the  highest 


RISORGIMENTO  401 

life  per  square  mile  is  surely  infinitely  more  Imperial  than 
to  multiply  Saharas  of  mediocrity,  to  follow  Stock  Ex- 
change adventures  in  Abyssinia  or  to  decimate  the  der- 
vishes of  Benadir  ?  In  the  village  of  my  home  there  is 
only  a  single  shop,  and  it  writes  over  its  windows  the 
proud  legend  :  "  To  lead  in  every  department  is  our  am- 
bition." But  Italy,  in  open  competition  with  the  world, 
achieved  the  hegemony  of  civilisation  in  every  depart- 
ment. What,  beside  this,  is  the  military  heirship  of 
Rome? 

And  has  England,  the  heir  of  Rome,  so  enviable  a  posi- 
tion? Far  from  it,  alas  !  That  unconscious  or  anti-con- 
scious instinct  of  hers  has  landed  her  in  the  gravest 
situation  of  which  consciousness  was  ever  called  upon  to 
take  stock.  Holding  nearly  a  quarter  of  the  globe  with 
a  white  population  —  outside  these  islands  —  of  only  ten 
millions  ;  with  a  heterogeneous  empire  of  Colonies,  Crown 
Colonies  and  Possessions,  incapable  of  being  brought 
under  a  single  constitution  or  concept  but  that  of  force, 
and  tending  to  destroy  such  constitutions  or  ethical  con- 
cepts as  survive  at  home  ;  with  manifold  subject  races 
which  she  is  too  proud  to  make  freemen  of  the  Empire  as 
Rome  did ;  threatened  and  troubled  in  Europe  by  Ger- 
many, in  Asia  by  India,  in  Africa  by  Egypt,  in  America 
by  the  States,  in  Australia  by  the  Chinese  and  Japanese, 
the  heir  of  Rome  has  seen  her  palmy  days.  The  equili- 
brium is  too  unstable,  and  the  part  that  came  with  the 
sword  must  perish  with  the  sword.  The  Russo-Japanese 
war — the  most  important  event  in  history  since  the  fall  of 
Rome — by  destroying  the  glamour  of  the  white  man  and 
showing  that  Christianity  is  not  essential  to  success  in 
slaughter  —  has  shaken  the  foundations  of  her  Indian  and 
Egyptian  Empire.  The  old  apprehension  that  Russia 
was  the  menace  to  India  is  justifying  itself,  but  it  is  Rus- 
sia's weakness,  not  her  strength,  that  has  provided  the 
menace.  Britain's  only  future  —  no  mean  one  indeed  — 
2d 


402  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

lies  in  Canada,  Australia  and  South  Africa,  and  even 
here  it  is  impossible  for  her  to  fill  tliese  great  continents 
or  sub-continents  with  the  emigrating  surplus  of  her  de- 
caying population,  especially  as  her  emigrants  prefer  the 
United  States  and  are  often  excluded  from  her  own  Colo- 
nies. Her  utmost  hope  is  to  keep  these  colonies  British 
in  constitution.  They  cannot  be  British  in  language  — 
French  Canada  and  Dutch  South  Africa  forbid  that,  — 
they  cannot  even  be  predominantly  white,  for  North  Aus- 
tralia is  tropical  and  South  Africa  is  not  a  white  man's 
country  but  a  whited  sepulchre  —  an  aristocracy  exploit- 
ing the  coloured  labour  it  despises,  a  society  poised  peril- 
ously on  its  Pipex.  How  unwieldy  such  an  Empire  at  its 
best  beside  the  United  States  —  one  continuous  area,  one 
language,  one  constitution,  and  but  for  the  hereditary 
curse  of  the  negro  problem,  one  free  and  equal  brother- 
hood !  But  how  cumbrous  even  the  United  States,  only 
kept  from  breaking  into  separate  States  with  separate 
dialects  by  the  modern  network  of  railways,  telegraphs 
and  newspapers  !  How  much  more  favourable  to  inten- 
sive and  exalted  living,  a  compact  little  country  like 
Italy,  rich  in  all  the  essentials  of  greatness  and  happi- 
ness ! 

There  was  the  epic  sweep  of  a  statesman  in  Chamber- 
lain's vision  of  a  true  British  Empire  of  federated  freemen, 
but  even  with  him  Ireland  was  incongruously  excluded, 
and  the  first  fine  prophetic  rapture  has  chilled  into  com- 
mercialism under  the  British  incapacity  for  imaginative 
synthesis.  What  was  originally  a  consummation  devoutly 
to  be  desired,  and  to  be  achieved  only  by  sacrifice,  is  now 
presented  as  a  policy  that  will  pay,  and  even  pay  immedi- 
ately. In  the  same  breath  we  have  an  heroic  trumpet-call 
and  an  estimate  of  the  profits.  It  would,  indeed,  be  strange 
if  the  good  coincided  so  closely  with  the  lucrative.  But 
that  is  the  trickery  of  all  forms  of  Protectionist  teaching, 
to  dazzle  with  two  alternative  advantages  simultaneously. 


RISORGIMENTO  403 

Matilda  is  the  heiress  and  Madge  is  beautiful  —  who  would 
remain  a  bachelor  when  wealth  and  beauty  are  to  be  had 
for  the  asking  ? 

Meantime  the  British  Empire — so  envied  of  the 
Italian  Imperialist  —  is  fast  being  conquered  by  Germany. 
For  what  is  the  mere  absence  of  the  German  flag  from 
our  shores  to  our  Germanisation  in  ideas,  our  transforma- 
tion to  German  notions  of  conscription,  our  permeation 
by  the  doctrine  of  blood  and  iron  ?  Already  a  pamphle- 
teer calls  for  Lord  Kitchener  to  "take  away  that  bauble." 
Whether  the  new  German  province  which  is  replacing  the 
old  land  of  freedom  continues  to  be  called  British  or  not, 
is  a  secondary  matter.  The  formal  consummation  of  the 
conquest  would  even  relieve  England  of  nightmares  of 
unmanly  terror  and  mountains  of  taxation.  I  like  to 
think  that  it  was  this  German  province,  and  not  the  Eng- 
land of  Edward  VII.  which,  ensuing  Peace  before  Honour, 
made  a  compact  with  the  Power  of  Darkness  and  put  back 
the  clock  of  Europe.  It  could  not  surely  be  the  old 
Colossus  of  Freedom,  whose  untold  millions  fertilise  every 
soil  on  earth  and  whose  ships  outnumber  overwhelmingly 
the  united  vessels  of  the  world —  it  could  not  surely  be 
"  the  England  of  our  dreams."  which  grasped  the  hand  of 
Russia  and  sent  Finland  and  Persia  to  their  dooms,  and 
now  trembles  to  stir  a  finger  for  any  cause,  however 
forlorn,  and  any  ideal,  however  British. 

Let  the  nation  of  Mazzini  take  heed  before  it  loses  its  own 
soul  to  gain  the  world. 

XI 

No,  it  was  a  road  of  quagmires  and  quicksands  into  which 
Depretis  and  Crispi  led  Italy.  The  less  she  knows  and 
thinks  of  Empire  the  better  for  her  and  for  mankind. 
Latin  self-consciousness,  if  it  has  faults  of  rhetoric,  at  least 
enables  Young  Italy  to  see  that  Empire  is  not  to  be 
bought   without   an   ethic   of   blood   and   iron,  which  is 


404  ITALIAN  FANTASIES 

foreign  to  the  home  ethic.  Imperialism  is  only  for  races 
strong  or  stupid  enough  to  run  a  double  standard.  Italy 
has  given  her  blood  prodigally  enough  for  the  right  to  be 
Italy,  but  she  has  given  it  of  her  own  free  will.  And 
volunteer  armies,  self-inspired,  are  the  only  sort  that  a 
true  civilisation  can  tolerate.  Despicable  is  the  nation 
which  sends  mercenaries  to  do  its  fighting.  The  soldier,  like 
the  priest  —  whose  black  robe  makes  the  eternal  ground- 
bass  of  Italy  —  is  one  of  the  unfortunate  differentiations  of 
humanity  —  a  type  that  should  never  have  been  evolved. 
Specialisation  —  division  of  labour  —  is  all  very  well  when 
it  gives  us  doctors,  carpenters,  engineers,  lawyers,  but 
every  man  must  do  his  own  praying  and  his  own  fighting. 
It  is  comforting  to  find  Young  Italy  as  set  against 
soldiers  as  against  priests. 

Though  United  Italy  has  followed  the  normal  path 
of  nationhood  —  large  army,  large  navy,  large  taxes,  and 
my  country  right  or  wrong  —  there  is  still  a  saving  rem- 
nant to  justify  Mazzini's  prophetic  faith  in  his  people. 
And,  indeed,  one  does  not  know  where  else  to  look  for 
"the  saviours  of  the  world."  The  French  —  once  the 
favourites  in  the  role  —  have  too  hobbledehoy ish  a  devo- 
tion to  the  sex-joke,  the  Germans  are  too  tamed,  the 
Americans  too  untamed,  the  Spaniards  and  Russians  too 
brutalised  by  bull-fights  or  pograms,  the  English  too 
inconsequent.  Possibly  the  New  Zealanders  may  be  the 
first  to  build  the  model  State,  possibly  some  people  of 
Latin  America,  that  land  of  sociology  and  secular  educa- 
tion. But  these  are  too  remote  for  their  results  to  leaven 
the  Old  World,  and  on  the  whole  the  Italians  with  their 
ancient  civilisation  and  tlieir  renewed  youth  appear  least 
unfitted  to  lead  humanity  onwards. 

But  the  notion  that  the  Millennium  can  be  reached 
through  a  people  with  a  mission,  inspiring  as  it  may  yet 
prove  to  Italy,  is  a  notion  not  without  its  limitations  and 
drawbacks.     It  may  easily  degenerate  into  aggression  as 


RISORGIMENTO  405 

with  th6  English  or  into  inactive  vanity  as  with  the 
Jews. 

True  that  the  Jews  —  the  original  missionary  people, 
in  whom  the  families  of  the  earth  were  to  be  blessed  — 
have  made  the  Millennium  possible  by  their  creation  of 
the  bourse.  In  their  Bank  of  Amsterdam,  founded  in 
1609  by  the  refugees  from  Spain  and  Portugal,  the  in- 
finitely complex  system  of  international  finance  took  its 
rise.  Professor  Sombart,  the  German  professor  of  eco- 
nomics, credits  the  Jews  with  the  entire  invention  of  the 
apparatus  of  the  Stock  Exchange.  And  the  Stock  Ex- 
change, in  criss-crossing  with  threads  of  gold  all  these 
noisy  nationalities,  is  turning  war  into  a  ridiculous  de- 
struction of  one's  own  wealth.  In  the  security  necessary 
for  international  investments  lies  the  prime  hope  of  the 
world's  peace.  But  it  was  an  evolution  whose  form  was 
not  foreseen  by  the  Hebrew  prophets.  Isaiah  predicted 
that  the  peoples  would  beat  their  swords  into  plough- 
shares ;  he  should  have  said  shares  in  ploughs. 

The  success  of  Esperanto  —  likewise  invented  by  a  Jew 
—  the  spread  of  World  Congresses,  and  even  of  World 
Sports,  constitute,  like  Science  and  Art,  a  valuable  cor- 
rective to  the  excesses  of  Nationalism,  which  has  been 
sadl}''  overdone  in  the  reaction  against  the  cosmopolitanism 
of  the  eighteenth  century.  Nationality,  born  as  it  is  of 
historical,  biological,  and  geographical  differences,  is  a 
natural  division  of  human  groups,  though  a  division  devoid 
of  the  rigidity  which  patriots  pretend,  inasmuch  as  all 
nationalities  are  constantly  intermarrying  both  ph3^sically 
and  spiritually.  But  Nationalism  — as  Bernard  Shaw  has 
pointed  out  —  is  a  disease.  It  is  a  morbid  state  due  to 
defect  of  the  organs  of  Nationality  —  to  wit,  territory  and 
liberty.  In  health  we  are  not  conscious  of  our  organs,  it 
is  dyspepsia  not  digestion  that  forces  itself  upon  our 
attention.  Nationalism  rages  in  Poland  or  in  Ireland  as 
it  once  raged  in  Italy.     But   for  Italy,  which  has   won 


406  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

back  territory  and  liberty,  to  continue  at  fever  heat  would 
be  sickness,  not  liealtli.  Even  too  much  self-admonition 
to  do  noble  things  for  national  reasons  rather  than  for  their 
own  sakes  is  a  morbid  self-consciousness.  To  make  history 
too  consciously  is  to  make  histrionics. 

XII 

Neither  the  reformed  Vatican  of  Gioberti  nor  the  king- 
less  Quirinal  of  Mazzini  can  provide  the  next  phase  in 
human  evolution.  Profound  was  that  teaching  of  Jesus 
—  you  cannot  put  the  new  wine  in  the  old  bottles.  It  was 
not  unnatural  that  an  Italian  should  look  to  Rome  for  the 
third  mission.  Rome  of  the  Ciesars,  Rome  of  the  Popes, 
Rome  of  the  People  !  What  a  fascinating  trinity  !  The 
conception  of  a  Rome  that  having  lived  twice  as  a  world- 
force  must  live  again,  seized  Mazzini  in  his  youth,  en- 
thralled his  maturity,  and  was  the  key-note  of  his  speech 
to  the  Roman  Assembly  in  the  brief  hour  of  his  glory. 
"  After  the  Rome  of  conquering  soldiers,  after  the  Rome  of 
the  triumphant  Word,  the  Rome  of  virtue  and  of  example." 
And  he  repeated  it,  not  yet  disillusioned,  in  the  very  last 
years  of  his  life  ;  founding  a  journal  to  bring  Roma  del 
Popolo  into  being.  And  yet  he  had  in  the  interim  pub- 
lished "  From  the  Council  to  God,"  that  wonderful  sketch 
of  the  new  religion  for  which  the  world  is  thirsting,  had 
added  one  of  the  grandest  pages  to  the  unclosed  Bible  of 
humanity.  That  page,  indeed,  is  perhaps  still  theology 
rather  than  theonomy,  still  too  saturated  with  the  old 
optimism — humanity  may  have  to  part  even  with  the 
assurance  of  personal  immortality,  and  go,  starred  with 
sorrows  and  sacrifices,  to  its  obscure  doom.  But  this  opti- 
mism, this  burning  conviction  of  a  new  heaven  and  a  new 
earth,  is  the  very  stuff  of  which  great  religions  are  made, 
and  Mazzini  appears  like  the  mighty  prophet  of  the  next 
phase  of  the  spirit,  the  divine  iconoclast  whose  fuller  faith 


RISORGIMENTO  407 

was  to  give  the  death-blow  to  the  old  theology.  And  the 
real  miscarriage  of  Mazzini's  career  is  not  that  he  laboured 
for  a  Republic  and  begot  a  Monarchy,  not  that  he  sowed 
for  a  new  social  order  and  reaped  stones  and  statues,  but 
that  he  spent  himself  on  the  doubtful  means  instead  of  the 
certain  end,  on  the  creation  of  a  United  Italy  which  was  to 
be  the  organon  of  the  new  spirit,  but  which  is  only  a 
nation  like  the  others.  The  great  soul  that  might  have 
kindled  the  new  faith  wore  itself  out  in  futile  political 
conspiracies  and  vain  exiles.  How  much  grander,  how 
much  worthier  of  his  genius  and  saintliness,  might  have 
been  Mazzini's  achievement,  had  he  not  been  obsessed, 
like  the  Middle  Ages,  by  the  figment  of  the  Holy  Roman 
Empire  ;  had  he,  instead  of  working  through  Nationalism, 
gone  straight  for  the  foundation  of  a  new  international 
Church.  Moses,  a  greater  than  Mazzini,  had  failed  in  this 
dream  of  prophet-people,  nor  is  there  any  more  assurance 
that  the  Law  will  go  forth  from  Rome  than  from  Zion. 
Mazzini  himself  protested  against  the  notion  that  the 
French  continued  to  be  the  chosen  people  ;  after  1814 
their  initiative  ended,  he  urged.  He  protested,  too, 
against  the  notion  that  an  instrument  created  for  one  pur- 
pose can  be  used  for  another.  Why,  then,  did  he,  whose 
organising  powers  might  have  found  supreme  scope  in 
establishing  the  religion  of  the  future,  throw  away  his  life 
for  Nationalism  ?  Valuable  instrument  of  world-progress 
as  nationality  within  sane  limits  may  be,  alluring  as  is  the 
idea  of  working  through  one's  own  nation,  perfecting  a 
model  people,  in  whom  all  the  families  of  the  earth  shall 
be  blessed,  the  instruments  of  the  new  order  exist  insuffi- 
ciently in  any  one  people,  if  indeed  they  exist  sufficiently 
in  the  whole  population  of  the  globe.  More  insistently 
even  than  nationalities  the  world  needs  a  new  Church. 
By  giving  up  to  Italy  what  was  meant  for  mankind, 
Mazzini  missed  creating  what  he  prophesied,  missed  ful- 
filling and  purging  of  its  monastic  and  medieeval  limita- 


408  ITALIAN   FANTASIES 

tions  that  earlier  prophecy  of  the  twelfth-century  Calabrian 
abbot  whom  Dante  placed  in  Paradise.  "  The  Kingdom 
of  the  Father  has  passed,  the  Kingdom  of  the  Son  is 
passing,"  taught  Joachim  of  Flora.  "  The  Third  King- 
dom will  be  the  Kingdom  of  the  Holy  Ghost." 


By  ISRAEL  ZANGWILL 


Children  of  the  Ghetto 

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"No  matter  what  he  may  henceforth  write,  this  book  will 
stand  alone  as  a  classic  of  the  Ghetto."  —  The  Bookman. 

Ghetto  Comedies 

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Each  of  these  tales  is  deliciously  amusing.  There  is  a  quiet 
laugh  in  every  page  —  the  keenest  wit,  the  subtlest  satire,  a 
Heine-like  sparkle,  and  never  a  sting. 

Ghetto  Tragedies 

Cloth,  $1.50 

A  new  edition  of  the  book  first  issued  as  "They  that  Walk  in 
Darkness."  "  Ghetto  Tragedies,"  says  the  Boston  Herald, 
"torn  from  life  and  presented  in  their  grim  compelling  force 
as  no  one  else  could  write  them  .  .  .  revealing  dramatic  force, 
intense  realism,  infinite  pity,  and  certain  knowledge." 

The  King  of  Schnorrers 

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"  Its  audacity  is  something  unequalled,  and  it  is  enhanced  by 
the  pithy  and  original  style  in  which  the  author  writes."  — 
Daily  News. 

The  Celibates'  Club 

"  The  Bachelors'  Club  "  and  the  "  Old  Maids'  Club  "  in  one 
volume.  "  He  has  ideas,"  says  the  New  York  Sun,  "  and  the 
art  of  sketching  delicious  situations  in  an  original  and  charm- 
ing way." 

Cloth,  $1.50 

The  Grey  Wig,  and  Other  Stories 

Cloth,  $1.50 

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The  American  Highways  and  Byways  Series 

By  CLIFTON   JOHNSON 


Highways  and  Byways  of  the  Mississippi 

Valley  Crown  8vo,  $2.00  net 

"  Mr.  Clifton  Johnson  has  a  faculty  all  his  own  for  entering 
easily  and  pleasantly  into  the  life  of  the  common  people 
wherever  he  may  go.  The  valley  of  the  Mississippi  as  he 
followed  it  gave  him  many  opportunities  to  study  phases  of 
American  life  which  belong  distinctly  in  the  category  of 
'  highways  and  byways.'  The  book  is  eminently  readable, 
while  from  the  pictorial  side  it  has  the  advantage  of  scores  of 
Mr.  Johnson's  own  photographs."  —  T^e  Outlook. 

Highways  and  Byways  of  the  South 

$2.00  net 
"  Mr.  Johnson  gives  more  illuminative  descriptions  of  homely 
details  in  life  than  any  other  modern  writer."  —  Town  and 
Country. 

Highways   and   Byways   of   the   Pacific 

Coast  $2.00  net 

"A  more  readable  book  of  travel  ...  is  not  often  published. 
...  As  in  other  volumes  of  the  series,  he  has  described  the 
rurally  picturesque  and  typical  and  has  avoided  the  urbanly 
conventional  and  uninteresting."  —  The  Dial. 

New  England  and  Its  Neighbors 

$2.00  net 

"  A  story  of  New  England  life,  literally  sprinkled  with  tales  and 
legends  of  early  days,  each  one  accompanied  by  an  illustration 
that  illustrates.  They  are  homely  folk  about  whom  Mr.  John- 
son writes,  and  he  writes  in  a  plain  and  simple  style,  giving 
pictures  of  them  as  they  move  about  pursuing  their  daily 
occupations."  —  T/ie  Delineator. 


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OTHER  BOOKS  BY  CLIFTON  JOHNSON 


Among  English  Hedgerows 


With  over  loo  illustrations  by  the  author  and  an  introduction 
by  Hamilton  \V.  Mabie 

Crown  8vo,  $2.00.     (Postage  20  cts.) 

"The  chief  charm  of  Mr.  Johnson's  work  lies  in  the  enchant- 
ing simplicity  with  which  lie  records  the  manners  and  customs 
of  the  country."  —  The  Nation. 


Along  French  Byways 


With  48  full-page  illustrations  and  many  vignettes  by  the 
author 

Crown  8vo,  $2.00.     (Postage  20  cts.) 

"  Mr.  Johnson's  book  is  a  peculiarly  winning  sort.  We  know 
of  no  other  which  describes  with  so  much  homely  simplicity 
and  sympathetic  pleasantness  the  rural  life  of  the  fair  land 
of  France."  —  JVew  York  Tribune, 


The  Isle  of  the  Shamrock 

Fully  illustrated  by  the  author 

Crown  Svo,  $2.00  net.     (Postage  20  cts.) 

"For   more   kindly   appreciation    no    people    could   ask."  — 
Chicago   Tribune. 

The  Land  of  Heather 

Fully  illustrated  by  the  author 

Crown  Svo,  $2.00  net.     (Postage  20  cts.) 

"  As  informing  as  it  is  readable  and  picturesque."  —  London 
Globe. 


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1 


Books  of  Travel  by  E.  V.  LUCAS 

A  Wanderer  in  London 

With  sixteen  illustrations  in  color  by  Mr.  Nelson  Dawson 
and  thirty-six  reproductions  of  great  pictures 

Cloth,  8vo,  $1.75  net;  by  mail,  $1.8/ 
"Mr,  Lucas  describes  London  in  a  style  that  is  always  enter- 
taining, surprisingly  like  Andrew  Lang's,  full  of  unexpected 
suggestions  and  points  of  view,  so  that  one  who  knows  Lon- 
don well  will  hereafter  look  on  it  with  changed  eyes,  and  one 
who  has  only  a  bowing  acquaintance  will  feel  that  he  has  sud- 
denly become  intimate."  —  TAe  Nation. 

A  Wanderer  in  Holland 

With  twenty  illustrations  in  color  by  Herbert  Marshall 
besides  many  reproductions  of  the  masterpieces  of  Dutch  painters 

Cloth,  8vo,  $2.00  net;  by  mail,  $2.14 
"  It  is  not  very  easy  to  point  out  the  merits  which  make  this 
volume  immeasurably  superior  to  nine-tenths  of  the  books  of 
travel  that  are  offered  the  public  from  time  to  time.  Perhaps 
it  is  to  be  traced  to  the  fact  that  Mr.  Lucas  is  an  intellectual 
loiterer,  rather  than  a  keen-eyed  reporter,  eager  to  catch  a  train 
for  the  next  stopping-place.  It  is  also  to  be  found  partially  in 
the  fact  that  the  author  is  so  much  in  love  with  the  artistic  life 
of  Holland."  —  Globe-Democrat,  St.  Louis. 
"  It  is  hard  to  imagine  a  pleasanter  book  of  its  kind."  —  Cou- 
rier-Journal, Louisville. 

A  Wanderer  in  Paris 

With  sixteen  illustrations  in  color  by  Walter  Dexter 
and  thirty-two  reproductions  of  works  of  art  in  half-tone 

Cloth,  crown  8vo,  $1.75  net;  by  mail,  $1.87 
In  some  respects  it  is  a  glorified  Baedeker,  a  guide  for  the 
traveller  interested  in  French  history,  in  pictures,  and  in  the 
distinctive  qualities  of  the  French  people.  There  is  charm  in 
its  vivid  painting  of  the  vivacity  and  gayety  of  Paris  streets, 
fine  analysis  in  the  penetration  that  sees  often  a  suggestion  of 
anxiety  under  the  animation  of  face  and  gesture.  He  has  a 
happy  faculty  of  creating  a  desire  to  see  the  scenes  he  describes 
and  a  knack  of  expressing  exactly  the  shade  of  pleasure  the 
cultivated  traveller  has  felt  and  perhaps  been  unable  to  put 
into  words. 

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UC  SOUTHERN  REGIONAL  LIBRARY  FACILITY 


AA    000  851  839    i 


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